My computer keeps telling me it has no virtual memory. I can accept that when I have four or five pages running at once, but it's starting to say it when I only have one page or even no pages open. What do I do to give it more memory? Thank you.

Usually this means that you have too many programs running simultaneously and not enough RAM to support them all.

In many cases, the problem can be traced to programs running in the background, or hiding in the system tray (by the clock). Shutting down and/or uninstalling these background programs will help. Running a Spybot scan may also help remove unwanted applications.

Another option is to install additional RAM in your computer. RAM can be installed yourself with only a screwdriver and 15 minutes of time. Crucial has a handy lookup tool to see what type of memory your system needs.

Last but not least, if the machine is more than 7 years old, you may want to start considering replacing the machine. You can find a decent Mac or PC for less than $500 (shop online for best deals) these days.

Hope this was helpful!

Virtual memory is related to Hard Drive space
and the message is its way of telling you its almost full
Work around, add another Hard drive they are cheap and I'll bet you'll get double the capacity of your old drive (which you must keep as its got the Main programs on it)
In My case I got a 160 GB drive(last year) for the same Price as a 40GB drive about 4 years ago and stuck to the same Brand Western Digital
Need to know what type of cable is connected to the Back of your hard drive Is it a thick grey cable or a skinny red cable?
Is no difference in Price but the Cables are not swappable Newer computers use the red SATA cable and Older Hard drives are called IDE drives

Here is a selection of W-D 160GB IDE drives offf Google Shopping and I'd pay no more than $40 New Regardless
Another popular brand to look out for (same price and value)is Seagate

Fitting Instructions is straight forward and the only difficult thing is to set the New drive to a "Slave" with the Jumper setting (bit fiddly) There is always a diagram on the Casing to show how It may be Preset already?www.buildingapc.co.uk/harddiskfit.php

Thanks for the information. I thought that might be the problem, but the system says it's only using about a quarter of its space.

Option 3 for temporary respite Intall and Run CCleaner on Both the Cleaner & Registry Cleaners
Untick the cookies box and You Need those to Keep youe settings / Log ins ect. www.ccleaner.com
Then Run a defrag
As I say it will restore Speed and stability again but For how Long? If it start
chugging again within say 1 or 2 months then Go for either of the Hardware upgrades obove

I have a 160 GB drive with 2GB RAM and Can open I estimate 15 to 20 running "stacked Windows" on My setup (all computers are different on these numbers) Graphic card Memory does Help too in the equation (I have a matching pair with 1GB dedicated memory between them)

quote:

Originally posted by bedstor:
Virtual memory is related to Hard Drive space
and the message is its way of telling you its almost full

Not quite. (Bedstor, you need to do some reading!!)

Anytime a program runs, there are little bits and pieces of stuff that need to be temporarily stored so that the program can run. Computers have a few different types of temporary storage: on-chip cache (super fast), RAM (fast), hard disk (slug).

When the cache fills, RAM is used, and when RAM fills up, Windows creates a "swap file" (aka "virtual memory") on the hard disk to hold the overflow from RAM. When the "swap file" overflows, Windows is forced to allow the swap file to consume more hard disk space.

So, it is not hard disk free space that is the problem. In fact, the free hard disk space is preventing your PC from crashing altogether!

The problem is that too many programs are trying to load in RAM, forcing Windows to shift stuff from fast RAM, to the sluggish hard drive. This causes a huge performance decrease - you may notice the PC slows to a crawl when the infamous virtual memory message is displayed.

CCleaner will help free up hard drive space, but does nothing about the RAM issue. 75% free hard drive space is a good indicator that you do not need to buy a new hard drive.

One thing that you can do to help us dig deeper into the problem:
Follow these instructions and list for us the "top ten" biggest memory hogs. From there, we can determine which of those should be banished.

Sorry for getting technical.

Thank you.