Windows Vista Shortage of virtual memory

I have had problems printing photos , when the screens did a "white-out "( I have two monitors, one was displaying Adobe Photoshop Browse, and the other Photoshop with the printer dialogue displayed). I get these white-outs a lot with Browse , and have not been able to get help from Adobe on that .

But this time I got an error message displayed telling me that the system had run out of virtual memory. The hard disc is 250Gb with over 100Gb free. I have 2Mb RAM , the image I was printing was 14Mb , and there were several programmes open but all minimised ( Office Outlook Calendar, Word etc ).The disc is defragged regularly.

Uncertain about virtual memory I googled it, and incidentally came up with a free programme called Error Expert which ran a scan, and claims to have found over 10,000 errors -mostly in "Deep Registry Scan ". It offers to fix them, but I'm nervous.
I wonder - if things are really that bad, wherther a planned re-instal of Windows (VIsta Ultimate 64bit) would be a better answer - although it does take a few days to set everything right afterwards and is to be avoided for that as well as other reasons ?

Any advice for me, please ?

 

Something that wants to make 10,000 "fixes "/changes in my regristry, not for me.

Some HP info:
http://h20000.www2.hp.com/bizsupport/TechSupport/Document.jsp?objectID=bpp03482
http://www.homeandoffice.hp.com/hho/cache/779-0-0-39-121.html

You can increase the size of the paging file (don't go over 4Gb for Vista 32 bit) and maybe set both the initial and maximum to that size. Although, finding out why the memory is low would be my main aim.
http://www.microsoft.com/windows/wi...p/sysdm_advancd_perform_change_vmpagefile.htm

The printer's memory should not be involved (? see above), but a 14Mb image is RATHER large
http://www.computermemoryupgrade.net/checking-printer-memory.html

Matt

 

For Broni ; in the VM window, I have Paging size for each drive shown as None ( I have two drives ;the hard disc I mentioned - 250Gb, and also an external 500Gb which I use to keep my image files )
VM was set to 2762- and the Window also said that maximum was 3069.
I have reset to that figure , as both minimum and maximum , using the System managed size option. Any further advice will be appreciated - this is an area I have not been into before.

For Mattman. I do club photography and also some exhibitions with A3 and A3+ size prints. 14Mb is not unusual - in fact it is small - most of my prints are from files between 21 and 66Mb . Compression via jpg destroys the quality for those purposes, so I store and print from PSD files. I have even been up to 600Mb when making a montage which of course took a long time to save etc - but had no problem with white-outs handling it.

 

Senior moment , that. Yes 2Gb.

Error log says 126 in the last hour, 1203 in 24 hours, 3066 in 7 days, Total 17,923 . Critical, however, is 0,0,0 .
Under Windows logs, System shows 5,919 as number of events and size as 20Mb ; Application sows 10,375 as number of events, and size as 5.07Mb.

All this is way over my head - looks as though something is wrong ; what to do about it ?

When I tried to open Photoshop after resetting VM I got an immediate warning message about the system running out of memory, so went back and reset with Custom size dotted for the paging file and 3069 ( which I am told by the window is the maximum) set as both minimum and maximum: the next time PS opened with no panics. ( thought I had done this ; maybe it reverted to something different because I missed clicking somewhere.)

Photoshop talks about scratch disks . My settings are "let Photoshop use 55% of RAM ( 909Mb)" and use C drive as the scratch disk - free space 107Gb.

I look forward to further comment and advice.

 

You can drill down to each error report. See if most errors happen when you are using Photoshop. Get the information about the errors that happen when you have problems (white-outs or VM errors). You can get more information by finding a single error and double-clicking on it. Look for recurring errors.

There are quite a lot of errors (from my perspective). You may need to find out how many relate to the imaging program/s.

I might uninstall and reinstall Photoshop, but if you have similar programs installed (that is, say, other image editors), I would uninstall those first.

You may need to find out how your memory is working. From the information, you seem to have quite a reasonable amount of RAM. You have plenty of free-space for VM (paging file).

Watch Task Manager -> Performance (tab) for high levels of memory usage.

Matt