Virtual Memory

J

Junglist0682

Member
Hey guy's, how's it going? Quick question.. Which I am pretty sure the best solution would be to purchase a bigger HD, but anyways ...

The Mrs has a 40gb hdd at work *yes it's small* and it's an older computer ... she just told me that she recently began to see a virtual memory low message appearing which today I noticed it as I was on lunch with her... The comp only has 1gig of RAM and when I took a look at the c drive to see exactly how much space is available.. it only shows so many amounts of MB :eek:

I myself then said well there you go.. we need to get you a bigger HDD to avoid this, but as I was reading online I noticed that you can change the virtual memory ... would doing this help in anway? I mean she bascially only has so much about MBs available at this moment?

Any help would be great ... Thanks
 
okay, I do not have a complex understanding of this, but I will take a swing at it.

Virtual memory is hard drive space set aside to act like RAM. It only comes into play when you run out of RAM. Basically if you are running a program that needs 1536 MB of RAM, then you will have 512 MB put into virtual memory. I don't think that the virtual memory space is written to the drive, meaning that programs can take that space. So based on my understanding, you can do one of a couple of things. 1. Upgrade the RAM. 2. Bigger HDD. or 3. delete some unneeded programs and files from the drive freeing space.
 
Thanks for the reply and sorry if I confused you in anyway.... I do believe that the best solution here would be to purchase a bigger HDD + purchase more RAM - only crappy thing is the max that the dell supports would be 2gigs
 
what model is it?

And 40GB is plenty for anything other than gaming, Photo editing or CNC file storage. I run 2 40 GB partitions on my laptop (2000 and xp) and have yet to run out of space, and that is running 2GB of RAM.
 
I don't recall the model at the moment... it's a work computer and she manages a property.

Thanks for the help/replies on the thread... appreciate it
 
If it says you are running out of virtual memory, plus you harddrive has no space left on it. You need both, more memory and a bigger harddrive.
 
In NT-based operating systems (and older), the OS had a habit of paging data into virtual RAM regardless of how much RAM you had available to your system. I'm not sure how the Vista OS's handle it.

While you could set a fixed value for the page file, it would be a temporary fix at best-- Win has a tendency to fill up a drive with logs and cache files, not to mention updates (and largely unused uninstall files for each update).

You could run the system cleaner to get rid of some of that overhead, but likely your wife will run into the same problem rather sooner than later.

You say this is a work machine-- do you own it or does it belong to the wife's employers?

The best short-term fix would be to get a larger drive in that machine. Considering the age of it, she (and her employer) might get more mileage out of a newer computer, but the one she is using now might have to break before they will invest in one.
 
Dngrsone said:
In NT-based operating systems (and older), the OS had a habit of paging data into virtual RAM regardless of how much RAM you had available to your system. I'm not sure how the Vista OS's handle it.

While you could set a fixed value for the page file, it would be a temporary fix at best-- Win has a tendency to fill up a drive with logs and cache files, not to mention updates (and largely unused uninstall files for each update).

You could run the system cleaner to get rid of some of that overhead, but likely your wife will run into the same problem rather sooner than later.

You say this is a work machine-- do you own it or does it belong to the wife's employers?

The best short-term fix would be to get a larger drive in that machine. Considering the age of it, she (and her employer) might get more mileage out of a newer computer, but the one she is using now might have to break before they will invest in one.
Click to expand...


Thanks buddy - I'm sure it would be best for the employer to purchase a new computer, but they haven't budge since she has been employed

Thank you to all who have replied :good:

Enjoy your weekend
 
Junglist0682 said:
Thanks buddy - I'm sure it would be best for the employer to purchase a new computer, but they haven't budge since she has been employed

Thank you to all who have replied :good:

Enjoy your weekend
Click to expand...

I agree. I admit to bringing my own machine into work (when I have either a spare or a portable) to use in lieu of the ones provided by my employer on occasion, but that's me and my sometimes too-much dedication.

Like I said, sometime the most expedient track is to make sure the machine at work is too broken for them to just patch-up; not that I condone violence against office machinery of any sort. :rolleyes:
 
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