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What is Virtual Memory?

W

wordomouf123

[H]ard|Gawd
Joined
Sep 26, 2002
Messages
1,609
I was playing BF:1942 on my brother's rig earlier today and in the taskbar thing, a little yellow icon showed up with an exclamation mark in it, i hovered the mouse over it and it said that the virtual memory was below minimum. This is not the first time it has showed up, though. My brother's rig has 256MB of DDR333 RAM. So my question is, what is virtual memory and ow can I get more of it?
 
Virtual memory is simply an area set aside on the hard drive that Windows uses as "virtual" memory when the physical RAM is overtasked. Basically, you don't want more virtual memory, you want to add more real RAM. 256 is the very minimum these days, you should get 512 or a gig if you want to see decent performance.
 
There is no way around it. Your system has to have some virtual memory. (also refered to as a swap file or page file). They are the same things.

Ideally you would like to have enough RAM to put all of your started programs into. Well, realistically that is not possible.

Therefore you use the hard drive as an overflow area when the RAM gets full. The extra is put onto the drive and when it needs to be executed it is pulled into RAM then onto the processor.

Something that you could do to increase performace is to set the page file's starting size to the same as it's maximum size. That will allocate a chuck of memory on the disk the max size right when Windows boots. That way when it needs to grow you don't have a ton of disk activity.

To set the size(in win2k) go to system properties -> Advanced -> Performace Options -> Change.

For XP it is in somewhat the same place.

The size of what it should be is debatable and everyone doesn't agree so experiment on it and see what works best for you.

If you want more info go to http://www.howstuffworks.com/question684.htm for another explanation.
 
There are also limits to the pagefile size- I forget the exact number, but it's something like 2 or 3 times physical RAM.

256MB Physical -> 512MB Page file. etc.
 
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