Gazette reader Ken H. writes:

Dear Dennis,

I read your comments regularly and find them very useful and informative. I have a question I hope you can help resolve. When working on my PC, I often receive a message stating that I am low on Virtual Memory, and that Windows is going to increase my Virtual Memory settings. I am not overworking the PC and I have an AMD 2700+ processor with 512 megabytes of RAM. Can you tell me what Virtual Memory is and why this might be happening? Many thanks for any information you can provide.

My response:

The topic of Virtual Memory can be confusing for some folks, but I’ll try to explain it as best I can (starting with the basics).

RAM, or, "Random Access Memory", exists in every computer. RAM are actually pieces of hardware (chips) and are used to store temporary data. The temporary data is then used for computation by the CPU (Central Processing Unit) at a later time.

So, for example: when you double click to view a movie file on your computer, it is first loaded into RAM (a chunk at a time), then moved to the CPU (Central Processing Unit) where it is processed and decoded, and eventually output to the screen and sound card. And voila, you have your movie.

RAM is also known as "Primary Memory". Comparatively, Virtual Memory (also known as Secondary Memory or Page Memory) is used in place of Primary Memory, but only if there is no Primary Memory available at the time.

Since Virtual Memory is stored on the hard drive, it is
significantly slower than RAM; therefore …

[Continue Reading

Why Does Windows Constantly Report 'Virtual Memory Low?']

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