Your computer system has a set amount of memory determined by the RAM currently installed. You can view the amount of RAM you have installed via Control Panel -> System.
The general rule is the more RAM the better. RAM is only for temporary storage and it allows you to have multiple applications open and to experience better overall performance when switching between apps and so forth. Unfortunately, the amount of RAM on your system is limited, but you can boost this with the Windows virtual memory settings.
Virtual memory uses your hard disk as additional memory so it will be slower. To get the best performance you don’t want to have it set too low or too high. If you are seeing messages saying “virtual memory is too low”, then you should definitely increase it.
The rule of thumb is to have approximately 150% of your RAM as virtual memory. We will show you how to set this in the example below.
How to Change Windows Virtual Memory
Open Control Panel -> System -> Advanced System Settings and click on the “Advanced” tab. Under “Performance”, click on the “Settings” button. You will see the following window.
Make sure you have the “Advanced” tab selected, then under the “Virtual memory” section, click “Change”.
To change the virtual memory settings, make sure the “Automatically manage paging file….” is unchecked. Then select the drive you want to allocate virtual memory and click on the “Custom size” radio button.
In the example above, we initially had 8191MB as virtual memory. However, the system has 8GB or RAM, so going by the 150% rule, this is not enough virtual memory. Windows recommends that we change the value to 12286, so we rounded up and added in the value of 13000.
It is also a good idea to keep the initial size and maximum size values the same. Once you have set your virtual memory numbers to suit your system, click “OK” and you are done.
Hopefully you will have a boost in performance and you will stop seeing the “virtual memory too low” message.
My computer which is a note book so different to normal computers i,m new at this and i just want it fixed. It keeps showing out of vertual memory/ why can.t it be fixed?
did you follow the instructions above. You just need to set a bigger paging file on your notebook. If it is running Windows, it is no different to any other computer.
The only issue is if your hard drive does not have enough space to create a larger paging file. In that case you may want to clean up your disk and remove old stuff or archive elsewhere.