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This problem is really annoying me and I have no clue why it occurs.

I have an Asus n56vv laptop with 8GB of RAM running Windows 8.1 x64, and here's the problem: often when I run certain games or applications I receive the following warning popup:

Close programs to prevent information loss Your computer is running low on memory, save your files and close these programs:"

Followed by the program I was currently running.

Now, this would be perfectly acceptable if I really was running out of memory, but this is NEVER the case. Every time this happens I check the task manager and about half of the memory is unused (~4GB). Also, this tends to happen even on old/tiny programs that definitely don't require a large amount of memory. For example: it regularly happens with Worms Armageddon, a game from 1999 which requires 32MB of RAM.

So clearly it's not really a "low memory" problem, something else is going on here, in fact if further proof is needed, let me testify that I always dismiss the warning and continue using the application and I never ran out of memory ever.

Everywhere I search online it is stated that this is caused by too little memory being assigned to the Page File, but I tried changing it and it doesn't seem to make a difference, in fact every time I check the PageFile used is always the minimum, since theres enough real RAM in the system that nothing ever needs to use the PageFile.

MDT Guy
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Master_T
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  • The program may leak memory. No need to be so touchy. :) Have you monitored memory usage while the error occurred? – Daniel B Feb 19 '14 at 18:38
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    This happens with lots of different programs, mostly games. I always check, they aren't using much memory. It just happened to me while running the MAME emulator, it was using something like 250mb of RAM. – Master_T Feb 19 '14 at 18:47
  • If this happens a great with MAME then it sounds like a problem with MAME itself – Ramhound Feb 19 '14 at 18:58
  • Don't just check a program's memory usage. Also check the overall usage. I once used a trainer (yeah yeah) which was somehow steadily generating page faults without apparent growth in memory usage. Yet, the memory was indeed completely filled. – Daniel B Feb 19 '14 at 19:01
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    @Ramhound: as I stated in both my question and comment, it happens with lots of programs Daniel: as I said in the question, I always check the overall memory usage as well, I have plenty left. I'm trying increasing the PageFile more and more at the moment, I reached 9gb and for the first time I haven't yet seen a warning. I'll let you all know if it lasts. – Master_T Feb 19 '14 at 20:17
  • As has been said in a great many simiilar questions, the message you're seeing has nothing to do with a shortage of RAM. It's about a shortage of available space for "committed" virtual memory. You make more room for committed virtual memory by increasing your pagefile size or adding RAM. – Jamie Hanrahan May 14 '16 at 20:27

1 Answers1

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For anyone having the same problem, I kept experimenting and I found that to solve the issue I had to set the Page File size to something >9500 mb, anything less doesn't seem to cut it, nor does chosing "let windows decide". Hope it can help someone else.

Master_T
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