If a computer keeps hanging up and intermittently reports a message that says the system is falling short of virtual memory and Windows is increasing the size of your virtual memory paging file. Than better buckle up, here’s a quick-fix solution on how to troubleshoot it.
Either you have very small physical memory (RAM) in your PC; this message is a consequence of an application causing a memory leak.
A memory leak is a common difficulty caused by badly written or inefficiently debugged applications which continuously consume a lot of memory until the program is shut down, closed manually or when Microsoft Windows restarts.
Virtual memory is also recognized as a page file or swap file .It is a file located on your hard drive whose path is C:\pagefile.sys by default. Windows and its applications use this memory in adding up to physical memory (RAM) depending on their space requirement. The default and suggested size of this file is 1.5 times the quantity of physical memory. Virtual memory is the sum total of physical memory and page file. Suppose a PC has 512 MB RAM, it contains around 768 MB page file by default, for a total of 1.25 GB of physical + virtual memory.
Finding the root of the trouble
- Determine which application is causing the difficulty.
- Press Control-Alt-Delete to open up Task Manager or rather click the Task Manager button after hitting Control-Alt-Delete. Another option is to access Task Manager by holding down Control and Shift, then striking Escape.
- Go to the Processes tab in Task Manager. Where you find a list of all the applications or parts of them currently running on your PC. You will see the memory usage outlined here. It actually doesn’t have anything to do with trouble running short of virtual memory.
- Click View, Select Columns.
- Check the Virtual Memory Size box, and select click OK.
- In case you have a VM Size column in your Processes tab. Choose the top of the VM Size column repeatedly so as to arrange the processes by their VM Size in decreasing order.
- As you can observe, the Task Manager shot that Mozilla Firefox is takes up the most of virtual memory. Roughly every application will use more memory the longer you keep it open. This is one reason that Windows becomes more and more insensitive the more you prolong running, and why ultimately one has to restart his PC periodically.
- Once it is determined which process is uses more virtual memory than required, you need to identify the process. Some are pretty clear, like winword.exe is Microsoft Word, iexplore.exe is Internet Explorer, etc. Others aren’t that obvious. The most excellent way to determine the source of a specific process is to use a search engine to search for the Image Name as shown in Task Manager.
Resolution
- Now that the application is identified that is causing trouble, it can be resolved
- A natural thing to try is to uninstall and reinstall the offending application if feasible. Either searching the Internet, and checking the support site of the software vendor would be the next two steps . Without much knowledge about which application is faulty, it’s difficult to recommend the solution.
