Virtual memory is space reserved on one or more hard drives as a temporary
place to put stuff from RAM while the system works on other stuff.

  There are a bunch of "rules of thumb" about how much virtual memory you
need, including the one Microsoft uses by default for NT/2K/XP.  (95/98/ME
defaulted to a variable "use as much or as little as needed" approach which
didn't always provide good performance, but at least also didn't require
users to think about it.)
  These rules all start from the amount of installed RAM, in the vague hope
that people usually have enough of that for whatever they do.  (I don't
believe NT/2K/XP will change the allocation, though, if more RAM is added
after the OS is installed.)

  The actual determinant of virtual memory size is the application load.
You could try having fewer programs running at once....
  OR, you can increase the size of the "swap file", this disk space used for
virtual memory.  Under 95/98/ME, this all had to be on one partition; on
NT/2K/XP, it's the sum of all swap space on all partitions.

David Gillett


On 7 Jan 2004 at 18:43, Thom McMahon wrote:

> Why does my system tell me I'm low on virtual memory?  Is there anything
> that can be done to increase "virtual" memory?
>
> Thom
> DELL2400, WinXP Home, 40Gb Disk, 2.2Ghz Pentium 4, 128 Mb Memory, IE 6,
> Crazy Browser 1.0.5, HP 842C Printer

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