"your computer is low on memory, please close X program"

Anonymous
2010-03-03T09:22:10+00:00

Hi all,

Just need to *disable* that warning above and any actions Windows takes because of it. I am NOT low on RAM as Windows indicates, I am only using 3 out of the 4 GB I have. I refuse to use a page file as I have no need to slow my system down to appease Windows. I truly LOVE Windows 7 Ultimate, and since I switched to the official release last August, has provided me with zero issues. I do not, however, appreciate Windows killing my applications when I hit the archaic 75% RAM utilization mark. I have 4 1GB sticks, if I only wanted 3GB, I only would have put in 3GB... It is most annoying because I rarely ever go above 3.3GB used, and I manage my RAM myself via dual monitor and task manager always open.

Many apologies if I come across as annoyed, but I am. I just crashed my VMware server (which will take a good hour to recover), and lost all unsaved progress 4 hours into a game, because Windows thought it important to start closing programs in the background because I used 3.1GB total of 4GB when I loaded a big map... Not huge in the grand scheme of things, but this happens daily.

System spec:

Windows 7 Ultimate 64-bit

AMD Phenom II X4 955BE @ 3.8GHz

2x ATI Radeon 4970 1GB (Crossfire)

G.Skill 1GB DDR3-2100 @ 2.1GHz (4GB total)

16GB SLC SSD HDD (system drive)

1TB Seagate Barracuda 7200.12 (storage drive)

1TB Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 external

Thermaltake 800 Watt Black Widow

Windows for home | Previous Windows versions | Windows update

Locked Question. This question was migrated from the Microsoft Support Community. You can vote on whether it's helpful, but you can't add comments or replies or follow the question.

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Anonymous
2010-03-04T04:24:14+00:00

Hey,

Page file does not slow down your system.

To enhance performance, it is good practice to put the paging file on a different partition and on a different physical hard disk drive. That way, Windows can handle multiple I/O requests more quickly.

Check with this option:

Change the size of virtual memory**http://windows.microsoft.com/en-US/windows7/Change-the-size-of-virtual-memory**

Regards,

Divya R – Microsoft Support.

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  1. Anonymous
    2012-04-17T22:04:32+00:00

    That "answer" does not address original question in any way.

    However the one with a link below it does. Yes, you can disable the warning. No you cannot adjust it. Yes bad things happen if you really run out of memory.

    I've been meaning to write performance monitor/eventviewer combo that will warn you of low memory situation with arbitary threshold but haven't got around to that yet.

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  2. Anonymous
    2011-12-14T00:18:48+00:00

    Hello Mihail Mihaylov,

     As you pointed out, this is an older thread and already answered.  I would suggest reposting this as a new question at the link provided below.  Please include any steps you have attempted along with any additional error messages.

    Microsoft Answers:

    http://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/forum?tab=all

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  3. Anonymous
    2011-12-11T23:05:39+00:00

    Hi, it is old thread but this is not answer of the question!

    I can not use more than 4 of my 6 gigs of RAM cause i'm getting that f'ckin message "your computer is low on memory, please close X program"

    WTF is the point to have 6Gigs of ram, but to be able to utilise only 4 ?!/"@$#&%

    running:

    Windows 7 Ultimate 64-bit on:

    Intel(R) Core(TM) i7 CPU 930  @ 4.0GHz

    Available OS Memory: 6136MB RAM (Corsair XM3)

    NVIDIA GeForce GTX 480 SLI

    2x 1TB WD Caviar Black HDDs

    and so on.

    please do not come with the excuse "enable virtual memory"

    Thanks a lot in advance!

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  4. Anonymous
    2011-07-29T20:06:16+00:00

    You wrote: Page file does not slow down your system.

    If you have 500MB memory, page file is set to 500+30% or so.

    If you have 4 GB, then why should you need a page file?

    Internet Explorer 9, is unusable, as it uses all your memory for no purpose.

    I am constantly told to close it as I am low on memory, so go back to IE8 and no difference.

    This is just bugs in Windows, which will never be fixed.

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