[Win 7] - low RAM warning message at 70% ?

[Just]

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.

 

[xilolee]

Hi Just. :smile9:

I also disabled the pagefile.sys some months ago (for few months), but I had to re-enable it although I increased the RAM from 4GB to 6GB, because I was getting your same message (in English or in Italian, obviously).
But instead my pc froze completely...

 

[axe0]

Hi Just,

How large is your hard drive?
Is a disk cleanup tried?

I'd like to know more about the status of the size of your partition to see if you can get more free space to enable the pagefile :)
With the 'status of the size of your partition' I mean the size of the Windows partition and what the space takes.

 

[satrow]

Memory, Process numbers, Handles, etc., all look within a normal range.

You might need to reduce the in-game 'pretties' to make the most out of the resources you have, any 'extras' require more CPU time and additional RAM, as well as GPU time/memory (some of which might be 'taken' from System RAM when available), though decreasing some of the major graphical settings can be retrograde, perhaps making the CPU work harder to do work that the GPU should be doing, it depends very much on the game(s).

Pagefile is the missing link here, if RAM can't be increased, and where the pressure seems to be. Once you've found extra disk space, even just 15% free space, for a 1-2GB Pagefile + 1GB fast USB2+ thumb drive/SDcard for ReadyBoost should see a noticeable improvement in the time before Windows flags for 'too much memory pressure'.

Most of the below really isn't recommended unless the primary use is gaming, it's likely to make 'normal' usage a little more sluggish, please reply to the previous questions/suggestions and their replies before trying any of them.

If that doesn't improve your playing time enough, disabling the prefetching/ReadyBoot/Superfetch(SysMain Service) should gain you more playing time - at the cost of slower boot and loading times. You can also use a safe memory cleaner, like KoshyJohn's* to minimise memory usage before you begin playing.

* I wouldn't use this on auto, better to keep watch on your System resources and learn more about the way they're used and use the MemoryCleaner before starting the game and maybe before a raid (wait 5-10 minutes after running it!) only.

Borderline hardware cases take a lot of time and testing to squeeze out the best game uptimes, it's not a task to be taken lightly, Windows (and games) can be pretty fragile once you dig deep! Back up and/or image frequently.

 

[Just]

Hi guys, thanks for comments and suggestions.

I'd like to know more about the status of the size of your partition to see if you can get more free space to enable the pagefile :)

Disk cleanup is being done a few times a year. NTFS partition is 64GB large (or GiB, I forgot) within a 750GB HDD. The machine is mainly used as a DVB-S PVR, hence most of its storage capacity is dedicated to direct-to-disk recording. Old good games on Windows are a side feature of that PC. I would then avoid to tune the partition size further (could I ?).

1GB fast USB2+ thumb drive/SDcard for ReadyBoost

First time I read something about that caching feature, thanks to you. Interesting but as a side topic here.

Pagefile is the missing link here, if RAM can't be increased, and where the pressure seems to be. Once you've found extra disk space, even just 15% free space, for a 1-2GB Pagefile [SNIP] should see a noticeable improvement in the time before Windows flags for 'too much memory pressure'.

Sure I could gave back 2GB to swap memory right now (partition has around 12GB free still). I would have prefered to avoid it and keep the 2GB free.

Most of the below really isn't recommended unless the primary use is gaming, it's likely to make 'normal' usage a little more sluggish, please reply to the previous questions/suggestions and their replies before trying any of them.

Thanks for any further advice. I am going to give a look at Memory Cleaner. Does it work at zipping elements in RAM too ?

 

[Just]

Finally, I activated back a 2GB memory paging and it solved the issue. No more Windows warnings. Before that, I had to give an additional 65GB to the system NTFS partition. Thanks to all participants for the advices received !