[viking10]

Hi,

My friend and I are both teachers in Western Australia with the Government Education Dept and we use their subsidy laptops (ACER). We seem to experience an error which comes up at the bottom of the screen from time to time saying 'your virtual memory is low......" However when contacting our help desk they are not much help!! Can anyone explain what to do as my friend's laptop is only 60 giga harddrive with 2giga RAM

Thankyou

viking10

[tomdkat]

I presume you're running Windows XP. Is this correct? That message means the pagefile that is currently allocated is filling up and Windows will usually allocate more space and grow the pagefile.

At a higher level, when your system starts using virtual memory that means the amount of physical RAM installed has been used and more memory is needed to support the applications running at any given time. So, the message you're getting about virtual memory being low means your system is experiencing a severe memory shortage and I would look into that.

What apps are you running that consumes so much RAM?

Peace...

[viking10]

Hi mate,

Thanks for the help. We run the Windows XP with things for classroom teaching like Smartboard, math and english software programs but nothing that I would honestly think would drain it. But will take take your good advice and ring the Ed. dept IT and tell them to get a solution for me

Again thankyou

viking10

[tomdkat]

Well, one thing you can do is start up the applications you normally run at the same time and start using them as your normally do. Then right-click on the bar that's along the bottom of the screen (the bar where icons are for running applications) to access the "Task Manager". In the Task Manager, click on the "Performance" tab to see how much RAM is in use. You can also click on the "Processes" tab and click the "Memory" column header to sort it either ascending or descending.

This will tell you:

A) How much RAM is being used given an typical "application mix"
B) Which processes (or applications) are using the most RAM

Peace...