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Problems with virtual memory and restart / shutdown


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In the short time I've been running 2000 on this machine I've noticed a few problems popping up. One of them is that after an hour or so of browsing and / or if I have 5-6 tabs open I'll get a prompt saying the system needs to free up extra virtual memory. I'm running the same spec I had with my former OS (98se, P4 1.6, 512ram) and never had any such problems then. This seems to have gotten worse since I installed certain updates (UURollup, Firefox 12 etc). Is 2000 more resource intensive or is it caused by something else? It seems like the longer it's on the slower it gets.

Also, whenever I try to restart the screen will lock up (if the pc has been on for hours). If I try to shut down, it will restart instead. I tried alternating the power settings but I don't know what the optimal settings are for 2000. I've ran defrag and chkdisk but that didn't help either. Are there any other windows or third party tools I can use to help diagnose and fix these problems?

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One might ask - what do you have the Paging File ("Virtual Memory") value set to?

Control Panel-> System-> Advanced-> Performance-> Advanced

(I believe it's the same as XP - "let Windows Decide" is the Default and if set too low will cause problems that you are experiencing.)

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So, you're saying the virtual memory is the cause of the restart / shutdown problem as well?

I had a look but there was no final "advanced" option, just Control Panel . System > Advanced > Performance. I took a screenshot of the windows. Let me know if the settings look okay or not. Virtual Memory Screenshot

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So, you're saying the virtual memory is the cause of the restart / shutdown problem as well?

I had a look but there was no final "advanced" option, just Control Panel . System > Advanced > Performance. I took a screenshot of the windows. Let me know if the settings look okay or not. Virtual Memory Screenshot

The "size" of 1.5x to 3x the available RAM is within the "normal" settings.

Personally I would never run a "dynamic" pagefile on any of my machines, i.e. I would use a "resonable" sized fixed size, like, on a 512Mb machine, a fixed 1024÷1024 one or a 1536÷1536 one.

This said, the issue you are experimenting is quite common with "modern" browsers, and I don't think you can do much about it (if not fixing the size of the pagefile, which does help).

You could monitor memory usage of the browser, you will see that the slowness when the pagefile is hit will be a little less with a "static" pagefile.

See:

http://www.askdavetaylor.com/how_can_i_fix_too_little_virtual_memory_in_windows.html

jaclaz

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If you're a firefox user, the 3.6.x is the one that use the less memory per tab and it can be also tweaked to release memory more often (some addon do this). The lastest beta is also quite good.

Lastly, if don't use any apps that need pagefile, you could disable it but of course applications requiring more ram than the physical might crash or refuse to launch.

Under windows 2000, i usually disabled pagefile but i wasn't running a recent browser.

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  • 2 weeks later...

512 MB is pretty low to surf the Internet nowadays (unfortunately :(). W2K itself needs more memory than W98 so it's not surprising that your system runs low of memory after opening 5-6 tabs in the browser.

Personally I'd recommend K-Meleon which requires less memory than other "modern" browsers like Firefox/Opera/Chrome, etc. but is still perfectly usable.

You may also try to disable unused system services as there are probably at least a few of them that can be safely shut down. It helps a lot on an older machine without tons of memory.

Edited by tomasz86
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