I’m writing up this solution today even though I was planning on alternating between Windows and Linux posts, but today’s post on Windows is because I got a call from one of my friends recently to help them out. Whenever they launched something, anything at all, they would have an error message pop up letting them know that their system was running low on system memory. Now, before some people jump in and say, “Well Paul, you could tell them to add a stick of ram to their computer”, this computer has four gigs of ram already in it, and they are using Windows 7 32 bit. On top of that, they have a terabyte of hard drive space that I threw in there the last time I was over, because they are one of those that likes to save… well, let’s just say “pictures” for the sake of argument.

While the error wasn’t because of said “pictures”, it is still a very common error if you run very labour intensive processes on your computer, such as Adobe Photoshop/Premier or anything like that on a not so powerful computer. So I’m going to tell you how to resolve it inside Windows XP and Windows 7.

Most people know how to fix this problem inside of Windows XP, as under Windows XP, it’s well documented on many sites. The steps are quite simple:

  1. Click Start, right-click My Computer, and then click Properties.
  2. In the System Properties dialog box, click the Advanced tab.
  3. In the Performance pane, click Settings.
  4. In the Performance Options dialog box, click the Advanced tab.
  5. In the Virtual memory pane, click Change.
  6. Change the Initial size value and the Maximum size value to a higher value, click Set, and then click OK.
  7. Click OK to close the Performance Options dialog box, and then click OK to close the System Properties dialog box.

However, since my buddy’s PC was not running Windows XP but instead, Windows 7, I had to dig around for a little bit before I found where it had been moved to. Unlike Windows XP, they’ve moved it to a bit of an “off-the-beaten-path” location. I did manage to find it’s new hiding spot in about five minutes worth of time.

  1. Open Computer up and hit the System Properties button, or Right Click on computer and hit Properties, or even still, go to the Control Panel and open the System button
  2. Then on the left hand side, there’s a button marked Advanced System Settings
  3. On the popup that opens, make sure you’re on the Advanced tab, then hit the button marked Settings under the Performance subsection
  4. After that, hit the Advanced tab on that new popup, then hit the Change button for the Virtual Memory sub-section
  5. Finally, once here, uncheck the “Automatically Manage Paging” option and increase the size manually.

Now, while I’ve shown you how to manually change your Page File in Windows 7, I would like to throw this out there as a disclaimer. Windows, from and including XP should be able to to this automatically. However, this is not always the case, hence why I showed you this way. If you reduce your page file because you want to regain space, you will run into fatal errors and things acting up. For some reason on my buddy’s computer, his was disabled and we don’t know why, hence why I had to manually change it for him. If you are not having any problems with Virtual Memory, DO NOT TOUCH IT.


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