Virtual Memory Low

  • Thread starter Thread starter Madison
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M

Madison

I just installed and started using Windows Movie Maker 2
a week or so ago, and the first video I made and saved
was fine, but now everytime I go to save this last video
I've finished, it says that my virtual memory is too low
to save it.

Is there anyway to clear out my hard drive in order to
free up more memory space?

Thanks so much.

Madison
 
Hey Madison,

How much free space do you have on your windows xp drive.

Have a look in "My Computer", what numbers are shown under Total Size and
Free Space.

How much Physical memory does your system have ?
Have a look in control panel/system/general Tab under the heading Computer:

How have you setup you virtual memory

control panel/system/advanced/Performance Settings/Advanced Tab

Under virtual memory, what is the total paging file size for all drives ?

Click on the change button,

How many drives are displayed in the window?

Click on each in turn, and for each, does it contain no paging file, or is
it set to System Managed Size, or has it been set to custom size, if so give
initial and maximum size.

Paul
 
Hey Paul,

My Windows XP drive-
Total size: 38.1 GB
Free space: 23.7 GB

Physical memory: 801 MHz and 128 MB of RAM (is that
right?)

Total paging file size for all drives: 239 MB

There is only one drive listed under Change (virtual
memory) and it's set to System Managed Size.

Thanks so much!

Madison
 
Hey,

Thats interesting, if its set to system managed it should grow it as it
needs to.
Lets try and prevent it happening and at the same time, increase the
performance of pagefile access. I have to say that 128MB is not actually
very much memory for running windows xp. Video editing is likely to make
demands on memory, so you really should add more memory to at least 256MB.
512MB would be better, but any more than 512MB is likely to be overkill in
your environment.

Step 1.

As you have a lot of free space, first off set the system to run with no
page file and reboot, you know how to get into that from the previous post.

When the system comes back up defragment the disk

My computer/right click on xp disk drive/properties/tools/defragment now

This will shuffle up all your files together to create a nice empty area,
which you can recreate the page file in, so bits of pagefile aren't
scattered all over the disk.

After the defragmentation is finished, go back in and reset the page file to
custom size, set initial size of 512MB and a maximum size of 1024MB. If you
get the error again, you can increase this upper limit.

Remember that the larger the pagefile gets, the larger proportion of what
you want in memory is being stored on disk, and hence the slower the system
will get. Also since you only have a 800Mhz processor, at times when stuff
is being read and written to the page file, quite a bit of cpu is going to
get used.

After writing the above, I had a quick search and came across this microsoft
knowledgebase article which indicates a possible problem if the size of the
file you are trying to save is larger than the size of physical RAM, so
again, points to memory.

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;814836

Step 2.

Just to be on the safe side, make sure that its not a virus which is
consuming your virtual memory.
If you don't have any anti virus software, try this free online scan at
symantecs website.


http://security.symantec.com/sscv6/default.asp?productid=symhome&langid=ie&venid=sym

Click on the "Test your computers exposure" link and select the virus scan.

If you need free anti virus software, try AVG from grisoft, I use it, and
have never had a problem,
www.grisoft.com

I use it in combination with zonealarm firewall, www.zonelabs.com

Good Luck

Paul
 
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