Windows Virtual Memory Too Low

Hi

We have two computers, mine in the office and my wife's in hers that are networked (but not seeing each other currently - but that's another issue!!). My wife's is forever giving the above message, and then increasing the memory size.

If I go into task manager, the PF value is 2.08GB!! The computer is only used for net surfing, e-mail, and her basic schoolwork. My computer is loaded with games, music etc, and it's PF value is around 500MB and I never get this message on mine.

We only ever get this message on her computer, and only when surfing hte net - and also mostly if the computer has been left for some time with a web page open.

It's really annoying, and for the life of me I cannot see why it should keep doing it. Can anyone advise?

Many thanks in advance.

PS - it's a Dell, it's running XP Pro, has 1.25 Gig of RAM.

 

Dave's Answer:

I'm going to assume you're running Windows XP, and seeing a message stating "Your system is low on virtual memory. Windows is increasing the size of your virtual memory paging file." Unless you have very little physical memory (RAM) in your system, this message is indicative of a buggy application with a memory leak.

A memory leak is a common problem caused by poorly written or poorly debugged applications where they continually use more and more memory until you shut down the program, end the process manually or restart Microsoft Windows.

Virtual memory, also known as a page file or swap file, is a file on your hard drive (C:\pagefile.sys by default) that Windows and applications use in addition to physical memory (RAM) as needed. The default and recommended size of this file is 1.5 times the amount of physical memory. Virtual memory is the sum of physical memory and the page file. So if your computer has 512 MB RAM, it will have a 768 MB page file by default, for a total of 1.25 GB of physical + virtual memory.

Finding the source of the problem

First you need to determine which application is causing the problem.

Hit Control-Alt-Delete to bring up Task Manager (on certain XP Professional configurations you'll need to click the Task Manager button after hitting Control-Alt-Delete). You can also access Task Manager by holding down Control and Shift and pressing Escape.

Go to the Processes tab in Task Manager. Here you will see a list of all the processes (applications or parts thereof) that are running on your system. You will see the memory usage here, but in my experience this very rarely has anything to do with problems running low on virtual memory.

 

I tend to set most units to 2048 of virtual memory space, I have yet to see a unit throw any fits give an error of low vm