When I fire up my computer I get this warning that says Im low on virtual memory. It tells me where to go and how to set it. When I checked it out my limits were set higher than it was asking for. Tonight when I was watching some emailed vids a warning said I didnt have enough memory to watch. I didnt have any other windows open. The tv part of my computer was off. I have one gig of memory and a 250 gig hard drive and a slide in hard drive of 160 gigs. Can someone point me in a direction to get this figured out please.


Mark

http://67-72chevytrucks.com/vboard/showthread.php?t=221209&highlight=virtual+memory

If that doesn't help, please let me know. The steps there typically resolve most errors, but a bad stick of RAM can cause similar errors - you might try swapping the sticks, just change the slots they are in - if you have an A and B slot, swap B to A and A to B. (sometimes it's '0' and '1', depends on the computer).

Please reboot your computer after making any changes to the virtual memory settings.

As always, happy to help if problems persist.

PS - if you are using XP or 2000, Here's a simple trick.

Press CTRL+ALT+DEL together. A popup window will appear. Choose "Task Manager" button. Click "Performance" tab. this will give you a printed summary of how much memory you are using, totals and the whole 9.

Here is screen shot of the task manager, I had no windows open... Im going to check out the above link now. Well I checked it out and I previously had been letting windows manage it. Ive never had my computer cracked open. I suppose it could still be bad ram . I have had that happen in a few copiers and printers (thats the business Im in).

No CPU usage (1% is nothing). Pagefile usage (PF usage) is low enough. Actually, I guess I lied. I think you need to open perfmon (performance monitor) to see how much memory is used, etc. OR you could click the Processes tab there and look in the last column to see if anything is using an exorbinant amount of memory (add up the totals).

Can you do that for me? Click on the Processes tab, and on it click the "show processes from all users" button (check it "on"). you can reshape the window by stretching one of the bottom corners down. Get it so that all of the processes are showing "mem usage" and take another screenshot if you can. Hopefully it won't be too big (cut in half and post 2 of em if you gotta).

I just want to see if anything is abnormally high in usage.

Kinda fuzzy but I think its readable

It's readable. And, actually, I was mistaken previously. I forgot that the "commit charge" was showing down at the bottom. There are two it - it is in format: A# / B#

A# = the amount of memory currently used by all applications and processes.
B# = the total amount of physical memory (RAM) and virtual memory.

In the previous picture, "Limit" is the limit of memory available. "Peak" refers to the highest recorded amount of memory usage since bootup.

In looking at the first picture above, if the green bar is up only that high and it's at 364MB, that would mean you have a pagefile at nearly 2.5GB (2,500MB). Is that true? You should never need a pagefile that size. I would let Windows manage the size of your pagefile/virtual memory. Is that not how you currently have setup?

I can give advice on how to swap around your sticks if you let me know which model of Compaq/HP computer you're using :)

I recently did that to the page file just to see if it would make a difference. I will put it back to the way it was and I will recheck let windows manage. That will put me back to square one. I know how to do the memory stick swap and will give it a try. Thanks for the insights Shifty, its much appreciated.

Mark

No problems.

Here is more stuff:

www.memtest86.com

This is a memory testing utility. The hardest part of using this tool is either A) Burning it to CD and getting your HP to boot from the CD or
B) Getting it on a bootable floppy and getting the floppy to boot

Testing once you get it up is easy. If you run an exhaustive test with that, it will check your physical RAM sticks for problems.

In the future, when that popup occurs, take a look at that CTRL+ALT+DEL menu and click the processes tab. See if anything is using an ungodly amount of RAM (Photoshop normally uses 100MB-400MB depending on what you got open - it's a resource hog)

guys,dont mean to jack your thread.Whenever I try to open the task manager,it says it has been disabled by admin.I cant find where to go to turn it back on.Any help would be appreciated.

David, you have not provided enough information. I need to know what version of Windows you are running. I assume it is XP, but I don't know for sure.

Chances are you need to sign on as an account with administrator priveleges and assign admin privilidges to your current account; however, it's totally possible your computer could also be infected with spyware, malware, a trojan or a virus which is preventing access to the task manager.

I highly recommend starting a new thread and we'll discuss?