In today’s era, most of the people have got advanced notebooks and computer but still there are people who suffer while performing tasks on the computer. Thus here is a short trick for them explaining how you can speed up* (run multiple programs at once on) your old (low RAM) computers without spending a single penny.

*TIP: Virtual memory does not speed up your computer but it allows to run more applications at once. This means you can run multiple applications but it all goes slowly. More is explained below with a video tutorial which teaches you How to increase virtual memory of a computer.

What is virtual memory and how does it actually works?
Many of you might be knowing about RAM (Random Access memory). It holds the data of the currently running applications but a if it is of very low size you cannot perform multiple task easily at a time. Virtual Memory is just like a file on your hard disk. Now what the Virtual Memory actually does is obtains the data from CPU and stores it in itself. The work of CPU here is to check that if any part of RAM that has not been used since some time it transfers the data to Virtual Memory, thus cleaning the space on RAM for other applications.

Animation Source: Howstuffworks

However writing the data to hard disk is much slower than writing data to RAM. Thus what virtual memory will actually do is it will allow you to run more applications but it will not offer you speed. You may feel the slowness while switching the application, as the data has to be again fetched from Virtual Memory into the RAM for further use.

Well you actually don’t need to understand all the above for increasing Virtual Memory of your system but I mentioned this because its good to have knowledge of what you are actually doing.

Increasing the virtual memory.
So let’s begin with increasing the virtual memory of your computer. Follow the simple steps below but if you still can’t understand what is happening just watch the video attached to this post.

• Right click on the computer and select properties.
• Click on Advanced system settings.
• Under performance section click “Settings”.
• Now select the Advanced Tab.
• Under the “Virtual Memory” section click on “Change”.
• Now uncheck the box yelling “Automatically manage paging file size for all drives”.
• Now select the Hard drive which you want to use for virtual memory.
• Select the “Custom Size” radio button.
• Specify the initial size.
• Specify the Maximum size.
• Remember you can specify as much as you want. 1024-2048 should be enough for any system.
• Click on “Set” & then “OK”.
• System will notify that you need to restart. Click “OK”.
• Save all your work & close all the windows as the system will now restart.
• Now click on “Apply” & then again on “OK”.
• Now system will ask you to restart now. Click on “Restart Now”.

Still can’t understand how to do it watch this video.

Some Precautions & Notes:

• This tutorial only applies to Windows Operating System.
• By default windows is smart enough to adjust the Virtual Memory of your system. Use this tutorial if you require extra memory.
• When specifying the initial and maximum size, allot the space according to your disk size. Generally 1024-2048 is enough for any system.