Thom writes:

<<Why does my system tell me I'm low on virtual memory?  Is there anything
that can be done to increase "virtual" memory?>>

There are many possible reasons. Without knowing more, such as:
What are you doing when you get this message, How frequent is it, What
programs do you have running at the time, Is this a problem which has
suddenly appeared, or has it been there all the time? we cannot be very
specific.

The more info you can supply, the more accurate will be the answers.

In general, some of the things which might generate this error are:

1. Short of hard drive space. You should keep at least 300 Mb of free space.
2. Insufficient RAM for the tasks you are trying to run (eg video editing,
graphics editing, gaming, are all memory-intensive tasks). 128Mb is a bit
light for XP unless you are only doing rather basic tasks.
3. Too many programs set to run at startup, or running in the background.
Run Msconfig and untick everything except Explorer and Systray, see if
there's any improvement. This is probably the commonest cause of bad
performance, and not helped by most major manufacturers loading up the
system, so that in some cases a computer straight out of the box may have a
very crippled performance. Close each program before opening the next.
4. Too many Services running---go to BlackViper.com website and see the
list of XP Services that should be disabled--many such as Indexing Service
and Fast User Switching are memory hogs and not usually essential.
5. You can set Virtual Memory manually, (Control
Panel/System/Advanced/Performance/Settings/Advanced.
The usual rule of thumb is to lock it in at twice the amount of RAM--in
your case 256 Mb, though I tend to go higher than that if you have plenty
of space--try it at 500Mb and see if any improvement. Try Max and Min at
the same figure, though there are various schools of thought about that.
See what works best for you, depending largely on what you use your
computer for. While you're in there, click on the Visual Effets tab and set
to best performance. This will disable all Windows animations and eyecandy
which also uses up some memory, though it won't make a huge difference.
6. A memory-intensive program running which is absorbing most of available
memory---or a badly-designed program retaining more memory than it
needs---though XP is supposed to do a pretty good job of managing that
behind the scenes. Still, there's a limit to what it can do, and
overloading the system can stretch it to breaking point in extreme cases.
7. If you're a font-junkie, too many fonts in the Font folder can overtax
any system. Fonts are loaded into memory at startup, so if you have 1000's
of them, this can slow the system down or in an extreme case I guess it
could start to create error messages. If necessary, move some out into a
secondary folder.
8. Don't overlook the possibility of overheating. This can cause random
error messages which are often very hard to explain away. Look for sticking
or clogged fans. Suspect this if its an intermittent error, of recent origin.
9. Some anti-virus software is more intrusive than others, and can absorb
quite a lot of memory. (I'd better not mention any names, but some of the
biggest names are the worst offenders). AVG is free, and runs very
efficiently on XP.
10. Look in Task Manager (Ctrl/Alt/Del)/Processes to see if anything stands
out as using excessive memory. At idle, Explorer should be the biggest user.

Don Penlington


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