How To Increase Virtual Memory

What Is Virtual Memory?

Virtual memory refers to a technique or a system, where the operating system tricks an application into thinking that it has a certain required amount of contiguous physical memory available when actually it doesn’t. It does this by extending the physical memory on to the hard disk.

Note here that virtual memory isn’t just extending the RAM onto the hard disk; it is in fact an extension of the RAM to the hard disk as well as assigning a contiguous address space to it. Virtual memory is a relatively modern concept (modern as in Windows). Early versions of DOS didn’t have such a thing, however interestingly, the Apple Lisa did.

Contiguous address spaces stored are called pages. Page file sizes can range from around 4k bytes to very large sizes for large sizes of RAM.

Virtual Memory Errors

Everybody, speaking generically, has sometime or the other seen an insufficient virtual memory error. Here are some of the causes:

The virtual memory required by applications is lesser than the designated value on your system. This can happen due to a variety of reasons; less RAM, being one of the obvious ones. Because the recommended and default page file size is fixed to a certain specific size, less RAM implies that programs that require more RAM, do not run and generate virtual memory errors.
There is insufficient space on the hard disk to create the page file.
The page file exists on an NTFS partition and the System does not have full control over the page file’s root directory.
Improper PC shutdown may corrupt the page file (pagefile.sys) and therefore, cause page file or virtual memory errors.
Memory leaks in an application, which may occur when an application keeps demanding more and more space from the operating system. This ends up with requirement for space that exceeds the virtual memory and the physical memory. The only way out of this is to use Task Manager in Windows to find out the offending program and close it. Updating such applications may help you deal with such errors in the long term.

If you are suffering from frequent virtual memory errors, it is best that you increase its size on your computer. Given below are the steps that you can use to increase virtual memory on Windows XP and Windows Vista computers.

Note: It is important to ensure that the virtual memory size you assign is at least one and a half times the RAM you have on your computer.

Run the sysdm.cpl command to open the System Properties dialog box.
On the Advanced tab, click Settings in the Performance section.
In the Performance Options dialog box, open the Advanced tab and then click the Change button to change virtual memory.
In the Virtual Memory dialog box, select the drive that contains the paging file and select the Custom Size option and then change the size.

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