Topic: Windows Virtual Memory

[Garden Manager]

Can anyone explain to me what this is please. I have recently been getting messages that my 'Windows Virtual Memory' is too low or running out, even when i have only one or even no programs running!

I understand most of the 'essentials' of a PC; Processor, hard drive and RAM/memory, all physical parts of the machine, but I had never heard of 'virtual' memory before.

I looked into the 'Help' pages but apart from instructions as to how to increase the virtual memory i am none the wiser. I tried changing the size of the virtual memory but it didnt seem to make much difference. i dont understand it enough to know what the problem is and how to put it right.

Is it possible that there is a problem with the PHYSICAL memory so the system is relying more on the virtual memory, which isnt up to the job?

can anyone help me please?

[kenkew]

Rather than me type forever more trying to explain it, GA. Have a look here.
http://computer.howstuffworks.com/virtual-memory.htm

Generally, if you keep getting a 'Virtual memory' message, it usually means you need more RAM.

[Garden Manager]

Thanks Ken. Very interesting article. It would appear then the physical ram on my pc DOES need attention. The PC (less than a year old) is supposed to have around 512 but the machine performs as if it has a lot less and so probably has to make more use of virtual memory.

[kenkew]

Ah! There you go. That certainly does make sense to me, 512 is way too low these days. Aim for a minimum of 1024. Usually it's cheaper to buy new rather than adding to what you have. Depends on what spare slots you have but RAM is cheap these days. You will see the difference once you get the extra.

[Garden Manager]

Great!!! More money. Sounds a bit like 'good money after bad' to me. I was sure we'd been sold a lemon, now I am CERTAIN we were sold a lemon! By PC World too.......

Thanks again ken. :)

[Hot_Potato]

Have been so glad to read these posts - I too have a problem with needing more 'memory' and had a computer chappie here some weeks ago who helped me with 'other probs' but he was totally unable to find more memory available for my particular series of laptop (others yes, mine no!) so I've still not got it.

In the past, when I've taken the laptop back to PC World (where I bought it nearly 7 years ago) they've twice told me I needed more memory and I regret to say I ignored them....thinking it was just a 'sales' gimic to persuade me to buy more......I don't download music or big files so didn't think I could possibly need more!

So still not got it but must take it back to PC World soon and ask them to install correct one for me.

Have added that link to my 'favourites' so I can read it more leisurely and try to understand it ???

H.P.

[Barnowl]

Have you tried the Memory Search facility at Kingston Technology?

http://www.kingston.com/ukroot/


(box on the upper right of the page)

[kenkew]

Have been so glad to read these posts - I too have a problem with needing more 'memory' ...........

.......So still not got it but must take it back to PC World soon and ask them to install correct one for me.


H.P.

You can 'help yourself' some-what here....at the top of this page you have, 'Files' 'Edit' etc...one of them is 'Tools'.
Click that and click on 'Internet options'.
In the middle of the popup menu it says'Temporary Internet files'...in there it shows 'Delete Files'....click that and then click 'OK'.
This throws away files you don't need.
You'r 'puter will sigh with relief. (There's no danger deleting these files, and you'll run faster.

[Melbourne12]

Great!!! More money. Sounds a bit like 'good money after bad' to me. I was sure we'd been sold a lemon, now I am CERTAIN we were sold a lemon! By PC World too.......

Thanks again ken. :)

Hold on, though.  All is not lost, so before investing more money, it may be worth trying two things.  First, check whether enough virtual memory has been allocated.

Start/Control Panel/click on System or System Properties

This will bring up a window called System Properties.  Click on the Advanced tab, then on the Settings button under Performance.

This will open another window called Performance Options.  Towards the bottom it will tell you the Virtual Memory size.  On my current machine it's set to 1536Mb, which strikes me as a good number. 

To explore it a bit further, press Change.  Yet another window will open, called (surprise!) Virtual Memory.  Amongst other information, it will give you a recommended VM size.  If what you have is significantly less than the recommended size, then you should increase it.  Otherwise just Cancel back out of the three windows.

If the VM setting looked good, then try the second thing.  Something must be filling up the virtual memory.  That'll either be a poorly written program that doesn't release memory when it terminates or a malicious program of some sort.

To ask a personal question, how's your virus protection?  Do you run McAfee or Symantec or one of the reputable anti-virus programs? Is it properly installed?  Have you run a system scan recently?  If the answer isn't positive, then your money is almost certainly better spent on that than on memory!

To check, press Ctrl Alt Del and click on Task Manager.  Then select the Processes tab and click on the MemUsage heading to put the processes in order. You'll probably need to click twice to show the greediest memory users at the top of the list.  If you have a socking great memory usage process, or a large number of similarly named processes running, then be suspicious.  Close the window, and close down your normal programs, and try again.  Are there still memory-hungry processes running?  From their names, might they be viruses or malware of some sort? Or are they obviously instances of something that you run that isn't releasing memory?  That should give you a good guide as to what is soaking up all the space.

HTH.  Drop me a PM if you'd like.

Cheers, John

[Hot_Potato]

Have been so glad to read these posts - I too have a problem with needing more 'memory' ...........

.......So still not got it but must take it back to PC World soon and ask them to install correct one for me.


H.P.

You can 'help yourself' some-what here....at the top of this page you have, 'Files' 'Edit' etc...one of them is 'Tools'.
Click that and click on 'Internet options'.
In the middle of the popup menu it says'Temporary Internet files'...in there it shows 'Delete Files'....click that and then click 'OK'.
This throws away files you don't need.
You'r 'puter will sigh with relief. (There's no danger deleting these files, and you'll run faster.

I already delete my T.I.F's and cookies on a regular basis and also go into 'explore' and get rid of 'my recent documents'.

I'm wondering if I'm getting confused (easily done) between Virtual Memory and RAM.......maybe it's the RAM I'm very low on!.....can't quite remember how to 'find it' but know it's something like 256MB and I'm told it should be more!

H.P.

[asbean]

RAM is the easiest thing to upgrade on a PC.  But you must have RAM that's compatable with your motherboard.  Go to the Crucial website http://www.crucial.com/uk/ and in IE click on scan my system.  It'll take a couple of mins, and they will recommend which sticks of memory to get.  Buy direct from them, they deliver next day or a couple of days later. Very reliable, we;'ve bought loads of memory form them, and never had a problem.

 :)

[grawrc]

Crucial is good

[Hot_Potato]

probably a very silly question but............how do I know if it's RAM I need or Virtual Memory (what's the difference please)

sorry to be so ignorant..........where do I click on my computer to see the difference between the two ?(what I've got I mean)

H.P.

[Garden Manager]

Melbourne12:

I have already increased the virtual memory, in part thanks to the info kenkew put me on to. I have set it to 2000mb and made maximum and minimum memory size the same. After a few worrying moments after changing it the PC seems to be better but not ideal.

I have an up to date Norton Antivirus on my system which works well, so I dont think its a virus. I also checked the task mamager for memory usage. No suspicious processes and although there are plenty running that I dont really know what they are, they all look like nessesary system processes. Biggest memory user seems to be my AOL browser. Not surprising really.

It seems strange that at 512 mb the RAM on the relatively new PC is inadequate. I have a laptop bought a few months before with only 256mb RAM. it runs similar software including wireles internet and seems at times to work better than the desktop, even though its  a less powerfull machine.This doesnt make sense to me. However i will be looking into adding more memory to the desktop to see if this helps. The 'Crucial' website looks promising in this regard.

Thanks for all the advice.

[Melbourne12]

probably a very silly question but............how do I know if it's RAM I need or Virtual Memory (what's the difference please)

sorry to be so ignorant..........where do I click on my computer to see the difference between the two ?(what I've got I mean)

H.P.

RAM is what you think of as a memory chip.  It's true memory, and can be accessed very rapidly by your programs.  Very few computers these days come with too little memory, since it's now cheap.  Some years ago, memory was expensive and some "bargain" computers tended to economise more than they should have done.

I haven't upgraded the memory on any of our machines for a couple of generations now.  The only time it's worthwhile is if you want to extend the lifetime of an elderly machine by updating the operating system (from Windows 98 to Windows XP, for example).  The problem then is that the processor speed will be a bit slow, and the graphics card isn't quite up to it, and you haven't got a USB connection.  By the time you buy all these add-ons, you might just as well have bought a new machine.

Virtual memory is a slab of the hard disk reserved for the operating system to "swap" information from RAM into a sort of overflow area.  It's fundamental to a windows type operating system, where you can have literally dozens of programs running alongside each other.  Of course, your computer doesn't really have the capacity to run them all at once, so the idle programs are swapped out into virtual memory whilst the active program or programs run in RAM.

You can easily extend the virtual memory by allocating more disk space.  My posting above tells you how.

Extra RAM is hardware and needs to be installed physically.

To see how much RAM you've got, use Start/Control Panel/System
A window will open.  Press the "General" tab (if it's not already open). Towards the bottom it'll tell you how much RAM you have.  My current machine has 1Gb.  250MB is probably a bit small by today's standards, and 512MB or more is better.

To see how much Virtual Memory you have, use the "Advanced" tab and follow the instructions in my earlier post.

[Melbourne12]

... Biggest memory user seems to be my AOL browser. Not surprising really.

It seems strange that at 512 mb the RAM on the relatively new PC is inadequate. ...

I think that 512Mb should be fine, TBH.  My suspicion is the AOL browser, which is notoriously bad at releasing memory, leaving multiple copies of itself clogging up the VM.

Do you switch off and restart AOL from time to time? Or use a lot of AOL windows?  I've had problems in the past as a result of this.  On one machine running AOL we used to reboot it rather than merely restart AOL for this very reason.  I suggest that if you use AOL as a service provider, you simply start up and connect AOL, then minimise it and use Internet Explorer, Firefox, or whatever else to do your internet browsing.

Anyway, it's worth a try.

[asbean]

If you're not sure about the processes running you can check them out here : http://www.processlibrary.com/.  (Put them into alphabetical order first, to make life easier!)

[kenkew]

 My top users are,

iexplorer - 49,292k

Skype - 30,924k

EXPLORER.EXE - 23,996

Power2Go - 22,220 (that's a desk top 'easy' click file/music to disc facility)

SVCHOST.EXE - 19,228k (this one has 4 mentions with different values. It's in 'system' but I'm not sure what it's about.)

[BAK]

Garden Apprentice,

apologies if this sounds nosey or personal but I think that it would be useful (in terms of people providing advice) if you could provide a brief summary of your hardware and software, viz.

* PC model name .. processor speed .. single or dual core .. how long have you had it
* physical memory we know (512MB)
* which operating system are you running .. is it up to date, ie are updates applied
* which version of Norton do you use .. is it just anti-virus or their total Internet Security Suite?
* any other software of note that you run on this machine?

Thanks

[Larkshall]

As said before, Virtual Memory is a chunk of the hard disk which is reserved for swapping files etc. Windows (maybe as a hangover from distant times) allocates free space on the hard disk as VM. If your hard disk is very full up then there is not sufficient free space available.

Linux handles it in a different way. When the system is installed the hard disk is formatted and partitioned, a "swap partition" is allocated which is a percentage of the empty hard disk. The swap partition is kept reserved for the system and nothing else can write to it. If the normal data partition gets full the swap is unaffected and remains available.

I recommend the use of an external hard disk to save all data to. This will take the pressure off the internal hard disk. A usb external hard disk can also be swapped from one machine to another. I use one and regularly swap it from Linux to Windows and back without any problems. As I use Open Office on both systems I have no problem with incompatible files, most other files are .jpg's which open in any graphics software.