Virtual Memory??

[SIRCOOKS]

can anyone help me with this problem...below is the exact email i got from my father in law, and i really dont know what to tell him....

Yes for a month now I have been getting that box that says it is increasing the virtual memory. I don't think its actually happening though!
I think the memory issue was only related to Outlook Express. My computer must have lots of Memory! I therefore went through some of the sub files you must have seen on the left of the screen below Inbox, Sent etc. and deleted a lot of old "matter"

It's working OK now but for how long?

My first symptoms of the problem were when I went to Tools / Check Spelling it would not open up, neither would my email address when I clicked on "to".

[Xylob the Destroyer]

Where to begin?
................
No offense, but it sounds like your pops isn't too tech-savvy.
I'd start by having him take a good hard look at all his emails and crapola in his My Documents folder and delete all the old-ass shit that he's got. If an outsider were to look at it, it would probably all be shit.
It's interesting how my stuff is stuff and your stuff is shit......

When is the last time he ran a defrag (with a good defrag tool, not that crap that comes with Windoze!)?

He can check his virtual memory size by clicking Start > Settings > Control Panel > System. In the "System Properties" dialog box, click on the "Advanced" tab and choose "Settings" under the "Performance" option.
A new dialog box will open titled "Performance Options". From here, click the "Advanced" tab and under "Virtual memory" it will say how much disc space has been allocated for the Paging File.
How much is enough is a very debatable matter of opinion. Some folks say at least as much as the amount of RAM you have. Some folks say 1.5X your installed RAM.
Then again, if you have 3G of RAM, wouldn't 2G of virtual RAM be sufficient? It is for me.....
He can play with the settings by clicking the "Change" button, but he can also **** up his OS and get the BSOD if he isn't careful.

[JerryB]

hi,
he may have more than 1 issue....
1. always do a virus scan and antispywareware scan when suspecting a problem... if for nothing else it rule out malware for being the cause...
2. virtual memory.. understand what virtual memory is.... VM (which is file) simulate ram when you don't have enough regular ram for your programs and projects your running.. it's not unusual once in great while the system see it doesn't have enough VM and it increases, that normal...
a. Now how big the VM is initially is dependend on how much ram they have and how big the hard drive is and how much free space on the hard drive...
b. we don't know, how much ram he has, , his hard drive etc.....
3.
A. a couple of things I would do first... is go in and purge the internet cache, and defrag... defragging helps in many ways... it consolidates space, unfragments files, programs work better and faster and are more stable.....
b. I would go into my msconfig and disable all needless programs that startup at windows boot... this does a few things... one it frees up ram, system will be a little faster and system and programs are more stable....
use this link to help determine what you can disable..
http://www.castlecops.com/StartupList.html
http://www.devcar.com/computers/startups%20-%20full%20list.htm

c. now if that doesn't help much then, depending on how much free space you have... you can go into control panel>system>advance>performance>settings >advance>change button to increase the allotted vm range... but in most cases if the other things are done that takes care of the issue...

can anyone help me with this problem...below is the exact email i got from my father in law, and i really dont know what to tell him....

Yes for a month now I have been getting that box that says it is increasing the virtual memory. I don't think its actually happening though!
I think the memory issue was only related to Outlook Express. My computer must have lots of Memory! I therefore went through some of the sub files you must have seen on the left of the screen below Inbox, Sent etc. and deleted a lot of old "matter"

It's working OK now but for how long?

My first symptoms of the problem were when I went to Tools / Check Spelling it would not open up, neither would my email address when I clicked on "to".

[Xylob the Destroyer]

addtionally, some programs are notorious for not 'releasing' the memory resources that they are using when you close them down.
With some, it's just bad programming. With others, it a so-called 'safety-net' -- 'what if the user closes the program and then wants to open it up again and access the same files with it that they were previously working on? this will make it load a lot faster the 2nd time.'. Personally, I think it's bullshit....

There is a registry mod you can do known as the "always unload dll" mod.
This may help.

JerryB's comments about malware are also something to definitely look into as a first step!
and his 3rd point is also quite valid -- beyond what I said about cleaning out email and MyDocs, cleaning your whole hard drive regularly will definitley make a difference in performance.
Setting your IE cache to a small number can assist with this to a degree, as will getting strict with IE security settings.

[Seeker47]

How much is enough is a very debatable matter of opinion. Some folks say at least as much as the amount of RAM you have. Some folks say 1.5X your installed RAM. Then again, if you have 3G of RAM, wouldn't 2G of virtual RAM be sufficient? It is for me..... He can play with the settings by clicking the "Change" button, but he can also **** up his OS and get the BSOD if he isn't careful.

In a tech forum, I saw this being debated, and some said it really depended on what you were running. PhotoShop or video editing being extreme-demand examples, with typical word-proc. or spreadsheet usage likely being at the low end of the scale. Several people said they had turned the pagefile down to zero, with no apparent bad effects. (This was in W2K, not XP or Vista.) Lately, I have been running mine at 500M., or half of installed memory, and I've previously run it at 256M., or several times (temporarily) at some nominal figure like 20Meg. Windows may or may not complain about this at bootup, but it runs, and runs adequately. By "adequately", in this case, I mean no crashes or stability problems. I do think that a number of things run much slower this way.

I'd be curious to hear from anyone who really knows a lot more about this than I do (not a difficult hill to climb !), as to what the risks or bad effects of a negligible or zero size pagefile might be. Your comments will carry more weight if you could cite some MS KB articles, or something like that.

[Nelson37]

Not interested in MS articles, real-world experience is always better.

Pc with adequate amount of RAM, 512MB, boots and runs slower with small pagefile. At around a GB, with minimal program use, small page file no real problem. Multi-tasking, various specific progs will become very slow even with lots of RAM and small pagefile. No disadvantage whatsoever to increasing the page file size, other than excessive disk space used. 1.5 X available RAM is the general standard.

The original problem is quite likely to be an overly large or corrupted PST file. At around 1 Gb in size, these become unstable. Empty deleted items folder, archive out older items. Empty all Temp directories, run specific anti virus and spyware apps.

[pfh]

Don't forget to tell him to actually empty the recycle bin before defragging lest we forget and assume he knows that.

[Jimm777]

My working PC has 4Gb RAM, and I've disabled virtual memory at all. At home I use PC wit 1Gig , but page file stills disabled, because I don't use soft, which used >1Gb RAM on this system.