0

I'm surprised recently by the fact that my OS complain about "lack of memory". So basically, I open and run many applications. I have installed 32GB RAM (Corsair) and as you can see in the screen shot, my Windows 7 Ultimate x64 recognize only 31.7GB. To me that's fine, because I understand the reason of not having the full 32GB.

However, what I don't understand is that Windows suddenly give alert to me that I'm low on memory, when I've only utilized 50% of it or just 15.9GB of RAM. I have 2x NVidia GTX 1070 8GB with SLI enabled, so I'm pretty sure that my RAM is not being used for graphics ability. The worst part is that, my applications really malfunction when I'm only using near 16GB of memory. When I closed some of the applications and reduce memory usage to below 15GB, then everything work perfectly again.

So does anyone understand what is really happening here? Could you help me?

Here's a screen shot of task manager. For sure Windows is able to detect the whole 32GB. But right now, I'm not opening many applications.

Task Manager Screen Shot

Windows 7 Memory 31.7GB Usable

user3009097
  • 21
  • 3
  • Your hardware is too new for an obsolete, unsupported and dangerous (when online) OS. Consider updgrading to at least Windows 10 (reported as supported until 2025). That's all. – ChanganAuto Aug 14 '22 at 16:15
  • @ChanganAuto I've been using Windows 7 since it was first released and never had any issues - never caught a virus. It's not an issue if you follow safe internet practices with a suitably locked down machine. – DavidPostill Aug 14 '22 at 16:38
  • Add a screenshot of Task Manager, Performance tab. – harrymc Aug 14 '22 at 16:40
  • Did you perhaps disable the page file or set it to low fixed size? – Daniel B Aug 14 '22 at 16:40
  • I wasn't not in favor of using Windows 10, before a vast majority of games supported, including old ones. Or at least there's a re-released version of old games. So besides OS factor, do you have other ideas? – user3009097 Aug 14 '22 at 16:40
  • @DavidPostill You're NOT representative of the home users crowd insisting on using unsupported OSes precisely because they DON'T follow the practices you alluded to, all the opposite actually, since the vast majority has an unlicensed copy obtained from who know where. – ChanganAuto Aug 14 '22 at 16:41
  • Can we please skip the pointless discussion and focus on the question? – Daniel B Aug 14 '22 at 16:44
  • @DavidPostill And the question here clearly is related with proper hardware support that the unsupported OS lacks. The graphics and supposedly everything else *may* work with older OSes (with caveats and workarounds and 'hacks') but the fact is it has been designed and engineered to work with the OS for which the vendors have published driver for and nothing older. – ChanganAuto Aug 14 '22 at 16:44
  • @DanielBn Proper hardware support IS the question here. – ChanganAuto Aug 14 '22 at 16:45
  • @harrymc I've added the task manager screen shot. – user3009097 Aug 14 '22 at 16:47
  • @DanielB why do I need page file, when I still have unused 16GB of RAM? – user3009097 Aug 14 '22 at 16:49
  • That has been answered many times here - yes, you do need a page file. – harrymc Aug 14 '22 at 16:51
  • @user3009097 You need a page file because applications will ask to use more memory than they actually require with the result that the (virtual) memory space gets exhausted long before physical memory is full. Windows refuses to allow over committing of memory, i.e. it will honour and make sure that every memory request is *able* to be fulfilled regardless of whether the program itself actually uses it. – Mokubai Aug 14 '22 at 17:52

1 Answers1

3

From the Task Manager screenshot, it is visible that your commit charge limit is ~32 GiB. That implies you have disabled the page file or set it to a very low size. The page file is indispensable to make efficient use of physical memory. That’s because most programs reserve more memory than they will actually use (this is called “commit charge”). Windows does not allow “overcommitting” (making promises it may not be able to keep), so all reservations must be backed by physical memory or the page file.

In the screenshot, you can see that while only ~9 GiB of memory is used, 12 GiB are reserved in total.

Allow Windows to manage the page file size or, if you truly want to, invest some time to find the amount of memory your programs reserve and set that as the fixed size.

Daniel B
  • 60,360
  • 9
  • 122
  • 163
  • Wow you are truly a life saver! Thanks man! Your solution really work. Once I've set the the paging files to auto-managed by OS (followed by restart), I'm now able to utilize my full RAM. After decades of using Windows, I never thought that page files are always necessary, regardless of how much RAM we have. – user3009097 Aug 15 '22 at 02:18