Lately, I’ve been getting a lot of “Windows Virtual Memory Too Low” error messages … it’s strange because I don’t really have a lot of programs or have used up anywhere near all of the memory I have on my harddrive. I even have an external harddrive for storing a lot of stuff … so what’s the deal with this mess?
Your hard disk space is irrelevant and is not usually called memory. Memory is the RAM in your system. For some reason, you are running out of it, and it has to use virtual memory. Virtual memory is when programs in RAM are temporarily moved to a scratch file on your hard disk. This scratch file is usually a fixed size.
The first thing to check is why you are running out of memory. If you are running XP (or win2k) you’ll need to bring up Task Manager. On your taskbar (the thingy on the bottom of the screen), right click and select Task Manager. Then click on the Processes Tab and you will get a list of processes running on your computer. Click on the option ‘Show processes from all users’ at the bottom in case something is running as another user. Then click twice on the last column header ‘mem usage’ and you’ll get the list sorted by most memory usage first.
If you find something using way more than anything else then you’re on track to solving the mystery. Look at the Image Name and see if it is something recognizable. Use Google or post back here if it is not something immediately recognizable. If you know what it is, try quitting that program and see if your situation improves. It could be a bug or something that is causing one of your programs to explode in size. It could also be that your workload is just too big for your current RAM.
msconfig… selective start up, uncehck all the progams that you dont need loading up on start up… also people seem to cpmaplin about spyware and shit like that… I never had that problem, but maybe get one of those programs that scans for it