Vista Annoyance - Close programs to prevent information loss
March 27, 2008 – 12:10 pmDuring the last days, I stubled across a very annoying feature of Vista very often: The resource exhaustion manager. It tells me to close Visual Studio and the Destop Window Manager. OK, shall I close the lid of the computer and go to sleep, too?
However, the stituation gets worse when I openened mspaint and took the screenshot! Now, a low memory warning popped up. The bad thing is: There are still 1777 MB which are used for caching, according to the Task Manager! On the other hand, it reports a page file usage of 2851 / 2939 MB, and shows a graph with 2,36 of 3,00 GB Physical RAM usage - rather strange?!
I see the point in caching frequently used files in the RAM, but an easy way to control this caching behaviuor would be nice. Due to the fact that I have installed 1GB of Intel Turbo Memory anyways, caching should have a very low priority in my case, I think.
Worst of all, I kinda saw it coming: I acquired a habit of ultra-multi-tasking when using an XP machine with 3GB of RAM … that was almost three years ago, and now that programs have a considerably larger memory consumption, I need more RAM - which is not possible unless you switch to 64 bit, which is fraught with its own perils, especially when it comes to laptops.
NOTE: I have virtual memory disabled completely.
2 Responses to “Vista Annoyance - Close programs to prevent information loss”
Like you, I have a 4 GB Vista machine with virtual memory disabled. I do all my development in virtual machines which use lots of memory and use IE7 and Outlook. I’m seeing this warning message a lot.
Like you, it seems like there’s still a fair bit of memory available at the time in the system. I thought perhaps it was just my machine, but it’s got to be something about running Vista with virtual memory disabled.
By Scott Bussinger on May 31, 2008
I had this problem too, but the resolution turned out to be interesting: http://devarthur.blogspot.com/2008/07/vista-page-file-in-netherworld.html
By Arthur Penn on Jul 17, 2008