How to Increase Virtual Storage Memory

Virtual memory is a disk space reserved on a computer hard drive that is used as the extension of the random access memory (RAM). The Windows operating system uses the virtual memory storage if running applications exceed the physical size of RAM. The increase of the virtual memory prevents RAM overflowing and system crashes.

Instructions

1. Log in as an administrator in Windows Vista. Click the "Start" button in the lower left corner of the screen.

2. Click "Control Panel" and then select "System and Maintenance."

3. Click "System" and select "Advanced system settings" on the left panel.

4. Select the tab "Advanced" and click "Settings" in the field "Performance."

5. Select the tab "Advanced" again and read the current size of the virtual memory in the field "Virtual memory." For example, "Total paging file size for all drives: 1024 Mb."

6. Click "Change" and uncheck the box "Automatically manage paging file size for all drives." Select the radiobutton "Custom size."

7. Type the desired virtual memory size (in megabytes) in the fields "Initial size" and "Maximum size." Enter the same amount of memory in both fields to increase the system performance.

8. Click "OK." When prompted click "Yes" to restart the computer.

References

• "Accelerate Windows by Tweaking Virtual Memory", Scott Dunn, PCWorld, Jun 14, 2007.
• "Windows Vista: The Missing Manual", D. Pogue, 2006.