My CPU is running low on paged pool memory, please help!

[SlasnerSb]

When I play Starcraft 2 my CPU will warn me that I am running low on paged pool memory and will then lag so severely that I am unable to play. Will changing my OS to W7 and adding some extra memory remedy the situation or does this have more to do with the settings of my pc? I am well aware of the fact that my pc is being bottle necked by my memory output especially due to the fact that I am still running windows XP home edition, only allowing the output of 3gb's of memory, or atleast that is my understanding. Any help is greatly appreciated!

CPU: e7200 2.53ghz
Memory: 2Gb's DDR2 X 2
Graphics: ATI HD4870 1gb's X 2
Chipset: P5Q Turbo
Power Supply: 850W

 

[FishAk]

Memory: 2Gb's DDR2 X 2

You have 4Gb? In that case it shouldn't be to little memory just for games. I don't know anything about Starcraft, but games in general aren't so memory hungry.

Where, and how big is your page file? Ideally, you wouldn't be forcing windows to page memory by having enough, but perhaps it's set too small, or you have it in it's default location, and it's fragmenting your OS partition? Being fragmented wouldn't cause a low memory message, but it would cause stuttering when the page file started getting used.

Perhaps you have something in the background consuming memory?

Switching to W7x64-bit would certainly be an improvement. W7 handles memory much better than XP, and 64-bit will let you address all you have.

 

[Mark R]

The paged pool of memory is memory that Windows makes available for drivers and OS internal usage - specifically, it is driver/OS memory that is allowed to be swapped to pagefile under low RAM conditions. (By contrast non-paged pool is driver/OS internal usage memory which must be kept in RAM at all times, and is never allowed to be swapped to disk).

Windows XP is severely limited in its handling of pool memory - particularly the paged pool. This means that the paged pool can run short under heavy driver load.

If you've hacked the Win XP boot.ini to use the /3GB option (which does nothing useful, except for high-end server apps), then this will massively cripple the paged pool's maximum size. If you have made this hack (thinking it improves performance with 4 GB of RAM, undoing it may help).

Other things that use the windows pool are system supervisory software - e.g. antivirus, firewall, custom drivers (e.g. for network analysis), etc. Disabling or uninstalling these software packages can free up pool memory.

The more recent versions of windows are much better at managing the pool.

XP is limited to a paged pool of 400 MB - this limit cannot be exceeded. However, because of limitations of XPs memory management, the paged pool may be limited to 100 or 200 MB on your system (depending on your chipset, BIOS, graphics card VRAM, drivers, boot.ini, etc.). 64 bit XP is much better.

Vista and W7 (32 bit) are limited to a pool of 2 GB, and 64 bit are essentially unlimited.

There is a registry modification that might help you (it tells XP to make the paged pool as big as possible during boot, before apps and other stuff get a chance to interfere with memory management - but it reduces your free memory for normal apps).
Load regedit and browse to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\System\CurrentControlSet\Control\Session Manager\Memory Management and set the value of PagedPoolSize to REG_DWORD Hex 0xFFFFFFFF

If you don't know how to edit the registry and restore it if you bork the PC, then it's not recommended that you try that step.

 

[tweakboy]

Nice explanation Mark. you rock. I personally have never ever heard of this problem happening to anyone. 4GB of ram you should be fine, Also try the page file to set it yourself manually to 4000 and 4000 .... Hope this helps,, very weird error. thx and gb