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Rocker
02-18-2006, 07:06 AM
Bear,
Another interesting little occurence lately has been that my system pops up a little window on the bottom right of the screen, informing me that my system is getting low on virtual memory, and is creating more. At other times, especially if I've been on the 'net for a while (half-hour or longer) I start getting this same window saying that my disc is running out of memory space; the other night it got down to 34kb, then went all the way down to zero, and nothing would respond. I had to power down and then back up. But this is bizarre...I have a 40gb HD split into two 20gb partitions. All the programs don't total close to that. It just told me I have only 131MB of free space, and asked if I wanted to clean the disc...I let it do the analyze-function, and it said I could gain a wopping 2kb. I defrag every couple weeks, and only on the C drive, as the D is told it's not needed. What is soaking up the memory, or at least telling the computer that it is being soaked up?

Example: I just went into the C drive directory, and the 'All Users' shows as 14.6GB in size. But in this folder is only Start menu at 127kb, the Shared Docs at 1.6MB, Desktop at 10.3kb and Favorites which is empty. Where is the 'All Users' folder getting that number, unless that includes the disc's free space, and if it's free why is the memory going down? The C drive's file system is NTFS and it says there's only 389 MB of free space at this moment but shows the total size as 18.6 GB. Why doesn't it use all that extra space as memory?
When I go to Control Panel, and go into System, it shows 608 MB of RAM.
When the little window came up after trying to decide where I could find more memory, one of the options was to do a system restore from the last restore point. What would that do to programs I've installed since the last time I reinstalled windows, like my AVG, etc...?? :hammer3:

Thanx, Bear.

BTW, my task manager came back all by itself. Like a dog that forgot where it lived for a while... :rolleyes:

bear
02-18-2006, 08:44 AM
What normally happens is the RAM gets used first, and programs are loaded into this RAM memory until it gets used up. It's then that it goes to the HDD to "swap" files. It sounds as though you have something running that is causing a memory leak (uses memory and doesn't free it when it's done). It may continue to ask for more memory...
14GB out of 18 used means that your drive is a little low (comparatively) on space. The swap file is probably set to use a percentage of the available space on the drive, and since that drive has only a few GBs left, that space is a little small.
Here's a link to more about working with this error and swap files in general:
http://support.microsoft.com/?scid=kb;en-us;837869

As for "All Users" not showing used space, that folder you see is just representative of the shared environment, not the actual files involved. Mostly it's shortcuts.
All users reports the space used by everyone on the system, so it's reporting closer to the actual space used. If you ever want to see how the space is used on the drive, go to control panel -> administrative tools -> computer management -> disk management. This will show you the amount of space used on every drive/partition.

A system restore would revert the system to the previous state, removing applications but not files created. How old the last restore was would determine what programs are affected.

Rocker
02-18-2006, 11:16 PM
Thanks Bear. Is there a way, on the link you posted, to see what's running in the background that's doing this? Task manager shows a bunch of zeros down the middle column, CPU usage, so it looks like not much is going on when this happens...

bear
02-19-2006, 07:03 AM
Well it's not the CPU but system memory that's likely having issues here. The screen shot below shows the the important details, found in the "performance" tab in task manager. These programs are loaded into memory, but actively running, so no CPU use. What they've done is to reserve a part of the available memory (both RAM and a section of the drive called a pagefile).
Essentially, when you start a program it tries to allocate all the space it will need while running, using the pagefile, and load the parts it actively needs into RAM. If you're low on disk space, the pagefile can't grow large enough and you get the warning.

One of the best articles explaining this would be this one: (geek alert) http://aumha.org/win5/a/xpvm.php

Rocker
02-20-2006, 12:16 PM
(geek alert) http://aumha.org/win5/a/xpvm.php
Better a 'geek alert' than me resorting to throwing a towel over the monitor so it can't see the sledgehammer coming...:D

The wife's away for a few days, so I've got the time to read the links you posted. the first one, though, is a M/S help-doc that addresses this problem when playing a game. I don't have this problem when playing a game because I don't (unfortunately) have time to play computer-games (unlike all my students...:mad: ) However, interesting note, I deleted 'Opera' (the ol' "Well, try this and if it doesn't work, get a bigger hammer..." approach) and the memory problem hasn't happened since. (Remember 'Laugh-In! As (I think ) Henry Johnson used to say: "Vehh-ddyyy in-te-dess-dinng!...but shhhttooo-piid!!") It would have been bad enough if it were a 'viable' message, but sometimes it would do the analyze-function, then I'd tell it 'No', I didn't want to delete files or programs or whatever at this time, and it would then tell me I'd resolved the memory problem, and that now I had 389MB of memory available. I guess computers aren't programmed with an awareness of the dangers of crying 'Wolf!' Anyway, I'll let ya know.

I've still got about 20 resumes to read for our advertised position.....
...eyelids clo-ooo-zzziinngg...sshhhnnoorrr...

Talk to ya soon.

Thanx, again, Bear. ;)

bear
02-20-2006, 12:31 PM
Yes, I realize it was for a game, but it was related because it discussed memory, and how to adjust it. Sometimes dissimilar causes have similar symptoms. ;)
The issue went away when you uninstalled the Opera browser? That *is* odd. What led you to think of removing that in the first place?

Rocker
02-23-2006, 03:22 AM
The issue went away when you uninstalled the Opera browser? That *is* odd. What led you to think of removing that in the first place?

Well, I wasn't real impressed with the way one used Opera, and it just didn't seem to work that well here, not that Firefox is all that hot, (constantly timing out and telling me that some sites can't be found, such as when I want to go from this page back to the PC help forum)...but I just thought I'd uninstall it since I only used it once or twice, and see what happened.
Memory problem gone, knock on wood-keyboard-sliding-drawer...;)

Even a blind squirrel finds an acorn once in a while...:D

Rocker
02-23-2006, 04:00 AM
I just went through the steps to increase the virtual memory to 'system managed size', so hopefully this problem will not reoccur.

Even a blind squirrel finds an acorn once in a while...

...but he always remembers all the rocks he bit by mistake...:o

bear
02-23-2006, 06:39 AM
Maybe not blind, but blind drunk? Never trusted squirrells....:beer:

Rocker
02-24-2006, 02:55 AM
LOL!! Canny little guys, aren't they? I 'd love to see 'em climb back up their tree after two cans...:beer:

But, as W.C.Fields said "I never trust a man (or probably squirrel) who doesn't drink..."