What is virtual memory?Any site for learning PC?

It means your hard disk is getting full. The physical memory available is usually insufficient to run several programs at the same time. Because of this Windows allocates a portuon of the hard disk for virtual memory. It is called 'virtual' because the area allocated is treated as memory. When the physical memory becomes insufficient data for RAM is written on the hard disk. When the allocated size is bigger than available free hard disk area a message will pop up. This will also slow the computer down. The three main alternatives are increasing RAM, deleting unnecessary files, or get a bigger capacity HDD. A combination of the alternatives will improve the situation. With a bigger capacity HDD we can increase the area allocated for virtual memory through Control Panel System Advanced Advanced Virtul Memory(change). This is for Windows XP. As for online tutorials there is no suggestion except for doing a search. all the best, rosdimy

HP has some good online classes and they are free. http://h30187.www3.hp.com/ http://www.hp.com/united-states/hho/classes/ http://h30240.www3.hp.com/ All three go to HP classes and i am sure you will find some you will like. One thing that I didn't see mentioned... You need to clean out your temp files and cache. A good cleaner I have never had any problem with is ccleaner. you can get it here: http://www.ccleaner.com/ Good luck and defrag regularly :D

Virtual memory is a technique that tricks programs into thinking that thier is a contiguous working memory, when in reality it may not be the case. RAM and Hard Drives are an extension of memory hierarchy. When Window's informs you of "low virtual memory", while it refers to the RAM, it generally is an indicator that you need to increase your swap file. [which has already been mentioned]

The most common cause I agree are too many programs running in the background and insufficient RAM to run all the programs. Check your system tray (beside the clock) and see if there are programs that are sitting there that you are not using. How much RAM do you have? I added a stick of 1 GB of RAM and it helped me a lot. I however remove many programs that I do not need at startup. Virtual memory is a lot slower than RAM.

I am not an expert so don't take my words too seriously. :) From my understanding, virtual memory is memory that is not real. Real memory or I should say physical memory is the memory installed inside your computer. Most of us have 1G and some 2G. To have more physical memory, you only have one way and that is to buy some more and plug them into the computer. Now, when you have started more and more applications, your physical memory available for use will be lower and lower until at a moment, you run out of physical memory and your computer will stop working. (in fact it stop working much earlier than you totally run out of physical memory) When you have opened a lot of applications, there are always some applications not actively running and thus the memory occupied by them is actually "wasted". So, why not temporarily assign those memory to other applications in need? And that's where virtual memory kicks in. Windows (and some other OS) will move the content in the physical memory into virtual memory (which is actually your harddisk). Doing so, you may then start applications that require a total of 2G memory where you only have 1G of physical memory. Now, all sounds so good now, so why we need to install so much physical memory and not only use the virtual memory? Because virtual memory comes from your harddisk and it is so much slower than physical memory.

I'm pretty sure that virtual memory refers to the systems paging file. Usually a good defrag program will fix your problem. I would recommend a Microsoft product, but I know that the defrag that comes standard with XP is crap. I would suggest spending some money instead of purchasing a free one, just to make sure that you get something that does what it says it does.

Hi there akumei1269! Good day to you! A virtual memory is actually a part or a segment of the memory of your hard disk that is used as a temporary storage for the programs that are running in your computer. Like the RAM, it is used to run programs and having low of that may cause some programs to run very slowly and the quick and effective way to remedy that is by just increasing your virtual memory through your system properties on My Computer. You can increase it if you have still an adequate free space on your hard disk because it is the one that will be used for your virtual memory. It is an easy thing to do akumei1269 and you can go to this site, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtual_memory for more information. I hope I helped akumei1269. Happy myLotting! :)