Error message about virtual memory?

[theslickvik]

Hey AT folks,

I was recently performing a spyware search using Ad-aware and out of no where I got this error message that said "Your systerm is low on virtual memory windows is increasing the size of your virtual memory paging file during this process. Memory requests for some applications maybe denied." I have 512mgbs of ram and this is the first time i have had this problem. By chance do i need more ram or is there a possible virus? It looked like an authentic microsoft internal error. Any suggestions???

Currently im using my Sony Vaio rs720G and i have two slots open for ram. What are my best options in terms of ram

 

[Lord Evermore]

It doesn't indicate any sort of failure, and it's not a virus or anything. It's not even actually an error message, just a "notice". It just means Windows had your swapfile at a certain size, and then needed to make it bigger because something you were doing was using a lot more memory. It's really kind of stupid for MS to make such an alarming message pop up, which confuses and worries people who wouldn't even have noticed any slowdown while it did the work, or would have just ignored the slowdown once it went back to normal.

512MB is usually enough RAM for normal tasks. If you happened to be running several programs at once, and they all used up a large amount of memory, then you'd start to run out and Windows would start to use the swap file (paging file). It does this so that you don't just run into a wall where you simply can't run any more programs. It's great for when you can't afford more memory, or just can't fit any more memory into a system, but if you can do both of those, then more RAM provides better performance.

Whether you really NEED more memory depends on what you're doing, and how often Windows needs to page data to disk. If this was just a rare occurrence, brought on by the fact that you were doing an Ad-Aware scan, and perhaps were running several other things in the background, but most other times you don't notice any problems, then you probably don't need more memory. But if you often find the system slowing down a lot when you try to do things like open a big video file, or in the middle of a game, and the hard drive activity light goes on continuously for a bit and then stops at the same time that performance becomes normal, that's an indication that you need more physical memory.

According to the information I can find about your computer, you only have two total memory slots. In order to upgrade, you'd need to remove your existing memory, and buy two modules of 512MB each. You need 184-pin DDR modules, PC3200.

You can either buy some from Newegg or go through a place like Crucial which provides you with their memory configurator, but it's a little more expensive. Even the cheapest modules at Newegg should work fine. (I kind of had to guess at the exact model for the Vaio for Crucial, since you didn't give the full model name.)

 

[theslickvik]

thanks a bunch Lord Evermore! This is really going to help. I do run multiple programs but most of the time its only windows media player and microsoft word and firefox. I turned on my comp from last night and its still running really slow. So i think upgrading will be best. Thanks a lot for the help