Hello,
The forum is dedicated to BSOD and my own issue here is lighter by a few orders of magnitude. I hope this is the right place to post however.
The machine is fully fed with 2 x1GB and runs games from the past decade at 720p. Games which have low CPU/GPU/RAM requirements, and typically are given to be confortable within 2GB, Windows included.
However, it may happen that Windows complains in the background that RAM is close to be exhausted (see attached screenshot). As this is Windows, "in the background" means that a warning windows suddenly pops up over the game, breaking full-screen mode and basically ruining your efforts at not getting caught or killed.
You have no choice but to put your gamepads appart, to catch back the mouse, to click on "Cancel", which wipes out the pop-up warning, then to come back to the game, to switch back to full-screen, to get back your gamepad and to go ahead (if you are lucky enough to be still alive).
Such a warning is disturbing and mainly non useful. I never had any system freeze after the message got canceled, i.e. basically ignored. Moreover, the pop-up warning appears when RAM occupation has not reached yet 3/4 of the physical capacity (here 1,45GB over 2GB are used, and it is enough to have the warning triggered).
What might be the right step in order to cure or at least to alleviate the problem ? Should I try to switch off at boot some Windows services, which may cause the trouble as they start randomly and complete some low priority housekeeping in the background ? Should I better re-activate the swap memory, which I knowingly switched off to save 2GB on the NTFS system partition (it only has a remaining 12GB free). Is there a way to configure the threshold at which the warning pops up (something closer to 90% than 65% of the RAM capacity)?
Windows is 7 Ultimate SP1 32bits and occupies between 600MB and 900MB when running alone (with none of the user's applications or games opened). Which is quite a high tax to pay for having the sole operating system up and running.
Thanks for you advices.
PS: I did not mentioned "add DIMM" as a possible curation, although chipset supports up to 3GB, as no vendor has ever produced non ECC DDR modules over 1GB each.
