what do i do?

[Tank.of.AH]

Okay, i play counter strike source on my desktop. the desktop is about 3 years old or so and has windows XP. i used to be able to play it no problem. well about two months ago, accessing the game was nearly impossible. it became extremely slow and when i finally got it to load and get in game, it closed it out saying "virtual memory too low" what do i do?

[mariorulezman]

Follow these directions please.

1)open up your start menu and Click run
2)When run opens in the box type dxdiag and hit enter
3)When it pops up you can hit yes or no doesnt matter.
4)Look at your processor speed and if it is dual core or single and everything. Look at how many Gigs of ram you have.
5)click the display tab at the top and then look at what your graphics card is.
6) post that information here.

[trkorecky]

To manually change the size of virtual memory, follow these steps:

1) Click Start, click Run, type sysdm.cpl in the Open box, and then press ENTER.
2) Click the Advanced tab, and then under Performance click Settings.
3) Click the Advanced tab, and then under Virtual memory click Change.
4) Under Drive [Volume Label] (Likely C:), click the drive that contains the paging file that you want to change.
5) Under Paging file size for selected drive, click System managed size.
6) Click OK to close the dialog box and apply changes.

Note After you change the size of the paging file, you may be prompted to restart Windows. If you are prompted to restart, the changes will not take effect until Windows is restarted.

[targetrasp]

If you're having to manually increase your virtual memory you've got a problem either with a piece of software "leaking memory" or you've filled your hard drive.  There's almost no reason your VM should be more than 1.5 times your physical memory in XP.  Go into task manager (ctrl-alt-del) and go to the processes tab.  click view, and put a check mark next to virtual memory and hit ok.  sort your list by VM size and view largest to smallest. 

with all that information you can do a google search to see how much virtual memory the applications on the top of your list should actually be using vs what windows says your apps are.  you may have to remove and reinstall a piece of software if it's something mainstream - if its freeware or some home brew stuff it could just be suffering from poorly written code. 

this is all assuming you don't leave your computer running weeks on end.  Windows programs tend to leak memory over extended periods of time (firefox is very bad for this) and a simple restart fixes your troubles here.