Virtual Memory issue, Thoughts?

[The Flannel Guy]

I ran into a problem on my dell desktop about a month ago.

A friend had been playing Oblivion for at least 14 hours on the system with very short breaks. When he finally exited the program, a dialog box came up saying that the computer was converting more Hard Drive space to virtual memory. I clicked sat down and promptly clicked off the dialog box without thinking about it! Good one...

First of all, does the computer save any kind of history of those faults that I can access to know what was said and what happened, or are they just lost to the wind?

AND...isn't the computer using Hard Drive space like RAM? I have heard that the system will do things like that when the RAM cannot handle the glut of info being moved around, so the computer allocates Hard Drive space like virtual RAM. Eh?

It wasn't a bad computer, I only had it for about 2 years. It was a DELL desktop and if I remember right it had almost 4 GB of processor speed, 230 GB Hard Drive, 1 GB RAM (yeah I know, thats low), and a Radeon X300 256 MB video card using that crummy hyper-memory-stuff, more like 128 MB of video memory! RAM storage, what a gyp! ( I do know that the video card it had is long obsolete!).

Any thoughts to this?

Thank you for your replies:
The Flannel Guy

[Minsc]

Originally Posted by The Flannel Guy

First of all, does the computer save any kind of history of those faults that I can access to know what was said and what happened, or are they just lost to the wind?

Might be in the event log(which I really don't know anything about but it should be in control panel/administrative tools). I'm not sure why you'd want a history of it anyway...

AND...isn't the computer using Hard Drive space like RAM? I have heard that the system will do things like that when the RAM cannot handle the glut of info being moved around, so the computer allocates Hard Drive space like virtual RAM. Eh?

Modern OSes(like Windows) can use part of the hard drive as RAM if they run out of it. RAM is faster than hard drive memory and better for running programs since you don't need to seek it.

There are also "files" on the RAM like on the hard disk(sort of), so you can run out of it. When you do, Windows would either crash whatever program wants more of it or use the hard drive instead.

Also, Windows has this feature where it can make the swap file(what it uses as RAM) bigger or smaller depending on its use, since if you run out of swap memory and RAM then your program will crash. It's pretty stupid since it'll fragment the swap file(I'd assume) and you can't really defragment it unless you do it from another OS. Fragmenting will spread it out over the drive and make it slower to use.

So it's not like it's a problem or anything.. It's pretty normal. If you want to configure your swap files, you'll need to hit Win+Pause, go to Advanced, Proformance, Advanced, Change, and then you can change it. I'd just turn it off or at least keep the min/max the same. (you might run into some memory trouble with a gig of RAM but it'll be rare)

The fact that he played for 14 hours might've caused it if Oblivion has a memory leak, but otherwise its memory usage would stay about the same no matter how long you ran it for.