PC Troubleshooting Questions and Answers -Virtual Memory Minimum is Too Low Message
Question: I am getting computer-generated messages that my" virtual memory minimum is too low", and the "size of my virtual memory paging file is being increased". This has happened a half-dozen times in the past several months. What does it mean, should I be doing something to avoid getting these messages??? Thank you.
Answer:
Virtual memory is used when you are running low on RAM memory. You
computer will then use the hard drive for temporary memory once your
regular RAM is getting used up. Hard drive memory is much slower than
RAM and your computer allocates a certain amount of hard drive space to
virtual memory in what is called a pagefile. If your hard drive is also
getting full then that's less room for virtual memory usage. Usually a
reboot will flush your memory and take care of it but if you are getting
this message all the time you may want to invest in adding more RAM to
your computer. You can also increase your virtual memory size by adding a
user defined pagefile higher than the set system amount. This is done
by right clicking My Computer and choosing Properties. Then go to the
Advanced tab and then click on Settings in the Performance area. Click
on the Advanced tab there and then there is a section called Virtual
memory. Here you can click on Change and for your C drive you can click
on Custom size and make the minimum and maximum values higher than what
Windows has them set for. If you have other hard drives you can make a
pagefile for those drives as well. If you are low on hard drive space
then this may not help you.
