One of my friend’s branded laptop COMPAQ had recently caused by shutting down automatically again and again. For what he told me this was caused by opened up the IE or Firefox for a few moment. So without knowing or investigating the problem, I then helped him to recovered all his system by Recovery Program which mostly provided by COMPAQ, and ran through the 10-Steps-Setting. When I came to the Step-5, I discovered that his Virtual Memory was running too slow and sometime with an error message from Windows XP displaying “YOUR SYSTEM IS RUNNING WITH TOO LITTLE VIRTUAL MEMORY”, and I think this is another reason which mostly can cause your PC/laptop hanging sometimes.
What is Virtual Memory?
RAM (Random Access Memory) exists in every computer and they are pieces of hardware (chips) used to store temporary data which to compute by the CPU (Central Processing Unit). Virtual Memory (also known as “Secondary Memory” or “Page Memory”) is used in place of RAM (known as “Primary Memory”), but only if there is no Primary Memory available at the time.

Finding the source of problem:
Hit <Ctrl>+<Alt>+<del> to display a Windows Task Manager, you can see the list of all on “Processes” tab, but in my experience, you can’t rarely tell by only view “Memory Usage”.

So I clicked on “View” then “Select Column” and checked-box on “Virtual Memory Size”.

I then opened up like 30 tabs on Firefox and 20 tabs on Internet Explorer.

As expected, these two mainly reasons to cause your Virtual Memory running slow. For both, this is the consequence of leaving them open for more than a week straight. Almost every application will use more memory the longer you keep it open, though some are worse than others. This is one reason that Windows becomes more and more unresponsive the longer you keep it running, and why you end up to restart your computer periodically.

Why Virtual Memory is too slow?
If you constantly getting the message that your system needs to increase Virtual Memory but you’re actually not overworking the PC, I would suspect a memory leak.

How to get rid of Memory Leak?
Right-click on My Computer > Properties > Advanced tab. Under Performance section > Settings. Go Advanced tab, under Virtual Memory section, click Change. The default and recommended size of this file is 1.5 times the amount of physical memory. Virtual memory is the sum of physical memory and the page file. So if your computer has 1024 MB RAM, it will have a 1536 MB page file by default, for a total of 2.5 GB of physical + virtual memory. Now you can set your own Initial size by following 10-Steps-Setting on Step-5.

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