NSR: Need more virtual memory on my PC?

Help! Calling all Windows XP gurus. I have a 5 yr old IBM ThunkPad (old, but works just fine for wmail and web surfing). Lately, I get warning messages saying "low on virtual memory" and then my laptop gets all funky on me: when i tried to open an app like Outlook, it said "not enough resources to open", same with a nother browser, etc. It then just crashed my laptop, and i couldn't get it to run again that day. This morning I tried firing her up again, and boom, started right up w/no probs??

I ran my SpyBot, nothing nasty found. My HD says I have 1.04GB of free space left (out of a total of 5.57GB). Anyone have any ideas here what is going on? Help!

buy more RAM

You're maxing your RAM and your using all the memory allocated to your hard drive. You can set your virtual memory settings higher, but that usually affects performance more than running out of virtual memory. XP configures your virtual memory based on RAM and Disk size.

2nd the suggestion to buy more RAM.

Clean the extraneous crap off your hard drive before you do this. That may save you the $$ of buying more RAM.

Start Menu --> Control Panel --> Add/Remove Programs --> Remove programs you never/rarely use.

RAM is usually only eaten up by programs that are running (or are running in the background - example, I lose 2 Meg to something called "ipodservice" even when itunes or ipod is not connected. - Hint - anything that is in the "system tray" in the lower right corner of your screen near the clock is a memory hogger - disable all that shit that you dont want or use).

to see what you gots, hit CTRL ALT DEL, and Windows Task Manager will pop up.
Click on "Processes" to see where your current memory is being used up.

Assuming there are no memory hogs you can (or want to) delete, you can increase your "virtual" memory by going to "system" in control panel [note, this is also where you can see how much physical RAM you actually have].
click on the "advanced" tab
Under performance, click on "settings"
click on "advanced" tab
under virtual memory, click "change"

this is where you set your VM by clicking custom size, and specifying a min and max.

Alternatively, you can click on "system managed size" and the system should automatically adjust provided you have enough hard disk space [are you set on auto now, or is it a fixed/custom amount?].



Buying RAM is fun, but it all depends on $ and how old the cumputer is.
you only got a 5G hard drive, so that sucks too.

how much physical RAM do you have now? 512? 256?

OK, here are the stats on this blazing ( :wink: ) laptop of mine:

system deets:
win xp ver 2002 service pak 1
intel pentium iii processor
448 mhz
128 mb ram

my hard drive reads as follows:

file system: fat 32
free space: 993 mb
total size: 5.57 mb

i de-frag'd and cleaned up all temp internet files and blew out some old apps that i never use, and ran virus check and spy bot. one spyware i can't remove is labeled as follows: TROJ ADWAHECK.A and is located in c://windows/system32/msts

otherwise, she s running good again, its just that funky virtual mem thing that occassionally causes my laptop to crash

Yep - RAM for sure. 128MB is not very much these days with the new app's/OS chewing up as much as they do. You may want to look at www.crucial.com for RAM, in the past I have seen the best deal's there (they also have a great selection of hard to find RAM).

And as mentioned earlier you can increase your virtual memory by changing settings but I believe you are in effect just swapping your RAM for your hard drive (hard drive paging is *much* slower). This mean's you would likely see the VM errors go away but would see a system slowdown when paging.

-t