Is your PC Slow - 5 Increase virtual memory

I’ve heard this term virtual memory over the years and I had no idea what it meant. I’ve occasionally used the term in situations where people were technically more ignorant than I am because it sounded geeky and esoteric.

While digging around for tips for this article, I finally did enough research to find out what it actually meant.

I have a 256 MB RAM on my Desktop. Apparently, when my RAM is overloaded, the PC uses some of the hard disk space to store files that are being used. The space allocated for this in the hard disk is called virtual memory. This can apparently be increased or decreased. If you increase it, it apparently speeds up your PC performance.

One question I had when I came across this tip was – does that mean that increasing virtual memory gives the same improvement in performance as in increasing my RAM. The answer is – Not really.

Virtual memory sits on a hard disk. It takes a few milliseconds longer for the PC to access virtual memory from a hard disk compared to from a RAM. So, although increasing virtual memory will improve PC speed, increasing your RAM size will probably be faster. I liked this explanation. At least on the face of it, it sounds simple and obvious. It’s a mechanical versus electronic search.

Having said that, its still worth increasing virtual memory. This is how you do it.

Click on Start – Control Panel – System – Advanced – Performance – Advanced

Under virtual memory click on Change. You’ll get the following screen.

First select the drive where you want to increase the virtual memory. In most cases, I’m told, it’s the C drive. I didn’t really understand why, but I presume its because the Windows OS is installed there.

Next, select “Custom size” and in the boxes for Inital
size and Maximum size enter the value for your virtual mamory.

This value should be around 1.5 to 2 times the value of your RAM. My RAM is 256 MB and so I entered 500 in both the boxes. Its also recommended that you enter the same value in both the boxes.Again, I didn’t really understand the explanation but it has something to do with the fact that if there are different values for initial and maximum, the PC may switch from one to another and the settings might change. At least that’s what the explanation sounded like to me.

Now click on Set and OK. You’ll be prompted to restart the PC for the settings to become active.