What do I do if I get a pop-up that says I am out of memory?

Periodically, while operating your computer, you might get a popup from Windows that says ‘Insufficient Memory’ or something similar to this.

This is a general system error that your computer is letting you know that you may have 1 of 2 conditions happening.  Either your PC doesn’t have enough RAM to open the applications that you want to run, and hence you might have too many running at the same time.  The other option is that you might have some old processes still running from applications that were shut down already.

Depending on the amount of RAM that you have in your computer is normally what will dictate how often you get this error.  To check on the amount of RAM you have in your PC, read my other post here.  If you have a very small amount of RAM, you might want to purchase more for your PC, if you have enough space to install it (slots for it to sit in on your motherboard).

If you have RAM that is not being freed when you close applications, this can be due to a memory leak or a rogue process that is not shutting down correctly.  There are 2 ways to get rid of this message.  The first is to simply do a cold boot of the machine, so all memory is wiped clean.  A cold boot is done by shutting down the system and waiting 10 or more seconds before starting it again.

If you have applications running that you can’t shut down at the moment, yet you need to get some RAM back, you can “kill” the process that is causing the issue.

***WARNING*** terminating processes that you are unsure of, might lead to data loss in applications that are open.

Let’s start shall we?

First open the Task Manager for Windows. Right click on your task bar and select Task Manager

select_taskmgr

when the task manager launches select the Performance tab

taskmanager

If your system is running out of resources the second graph will be very close to the top.

tskmgr_show

select the Processes tab and sort by memory used

tskmgr_memory

Here you will be able to see which applications are using the most RAM on your system.  You can select the application, and select end process.

tskmgr_kill

This will terminate the application, and get you back some of your RAM.  Remember if you don’t know what the process is, it might not be safe to terminate it.

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