I have 3GB of RAM in my laptop, why does vista always say that I'm low on memory after a few hours of use?

Question

My computer is not even a year old and it has 3GB of memory. I don't really use memory intensive programs. The most I'll have running at a time will be a few tabs of Google chrome, a few MS word documents and maybe a MS powerpoint presentation. After maybe 2 hours of running these programs, my computer begins to freak out and say it's low on memory and that I need to close programs.
So I close some programs and end unnecessary background running programs via task manager but this will buy me only about 20 minutes before it starts saying that it is dangerously low on memory again. Something has to be eating my memory but whatever it is, it doesn't show up in the task manager program processes. It gets to the point where I cannot do anything except restart. And a couple hours after the restart, the whole thing happens all over again...
(I don't think it's Chrome either because it happens when I use Firefox also)

Answer 1

I'm betting that the message you get is low virtual memory, yes? you need to increase the size of the page file....



1.Open Control Panel -> System and Maintenance -> System.



2.In the left “Tasks”, click on Advanced System Settings.



3.You should come to “Advanced” tab. In “Performance” section, click on Settings button.



4.Click on Advanced tab.



5.In the “Virtual Memory” section, click on Change button.



6.By default, “Automatically manage paging file size for all drives” setting is selected so that Windows Vista system can manage the paging file without user’s interruption. If you want change the paging file size, move the pagefile.sys to another drive, or disable virtual memory paging, uncheck the check box of Automatically manage paging file size for all drives.



7.Select and highlight the appropriate drive that users want to change the paging file settings under the box of “Drive [Volume Label]“.





8.To fix a permanent size for the paging file, click on Custom size button, and set the values of Initial Size 4095 (MB) and Maximum Size 4095 (MB) to make the size of pagefile.sys static. Then click on Set button.

Answer 2

When programs are installed on your computer many of them will set themselves to run in the background so they will open faster when you need them, the problem with this is that you get too many of them doing this it defeats the purpose by bogging down your computer. This microsoft tool will check for problems slowing down your computer such as those I mentioned and allow you to choose some programs that you do not need constantly running.



http://support.microsoft.com/gp/slow_windows_performance

Edit-http://windows.microsoft.com/en-US/windows-vista/Optimize-Windows-Vista-for-better-performance

I think you either have too many programs running in the background that you might not be aware of or you have a memory leak.

To see what is using so much memory right click on Computer and select Manage

In the left pane select Reliability & Performance

Expand the Memory section

Click the heading ie. commit or working etc. to put the memory consumption in order so you can easily see what is using the most. Also if a number continually climbs you might have a memory leak. Fluctuation is normal.

Answer 3

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Answer 4

Because Vista is a resource HOG. Get windows 7 or go back to XP, honestly Vista will run crappy up to 4gb+.