My computer has just started giving me a "you are low on virtual memory" message. I've been using it for 3 years with 512 RAM for makng music and flight simulation without any virtual memory problem until now and I'm getting the notification even when I'm doing something simple like listening to media player or looking at jpegs. Any advice welcome.

Run perfmon and monitor the Private Bytes, Virtual Bytes, and Working Set counters for all objects under the "Process" object. This will tell you how much virtual address space is in use (in multiple ways) by each process on the box, and you'll be able to see if any one process is running away with VA (and thus, causing virtual memory usage to go up). What is your pagefile size set to, btw?

You can use 'tasklist /v' to display a list of all programs loaded into memory.

Use a program like AutoRuns to disable programs that are running at startup that you don't need. You can download Start_ups.exe which lists most application that run at startup and what they are for.

Also it wouldn't hurt to run a program like CCleaner to clean you hard drive and Wise Registry Cleaner to clean out the registry. You can also use Eusing Registry Cleaner to clean out the registry. Run a spy ware checker such as Ad-Aware 2007 or Spybot - Search & Destroy.

If none of this works you can upgrade the memory in your computer.

My computer has just started giving me a "you are low on virtual memory" message. I've been using it for 3 years with 512 RAM for makng music and flight simulation without any virtual memory problem until now and I'm getting the notification even when I'm doing something simple like listening to media player or looking at jpegs. Any advice welcome.

hi,do you check how many RAM actually used in processes(Task Manager)?

there may be some processes occupying too much RAM.

hi,do you check how many RAM actually used in processes(Task Manager)?

there may be some processes occupying too much RAM.

RAM (aka Physical Memory) and Virtual Memory are not the same thing.