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Nice tip on diagnosing "too little virtual memory" issues on win xp

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mouser:
Just came across this nice page on diagnosing the "running out of virtual memory" issue on Windows XP, showing how to show virtual memory in the ctrl+alt+delete Windows Task Manager, which I never knew about:

http://www.askdavetaylor.com/how_can_i_fix_too_little_virtual_memory_in_windows.html?ModPagespeed=noscript

Giampy:
Some users of XP will be surely surprised as their task manager looks differently from the one shown above (until few minutes ago I was among those users):
http://www.question-defense.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/05/windows-xp-task-manager-with-no-tabs.gif

A search in Internet has explained this mistery:
http://www.question-defense.com/2010/05/19/windows-xp-task-manager-missing-tabs-no-processes-performance-networking-or-users-tabs
Shortly, those users must double click on the border of their task manager.

f0dder:
This is one reason that Windows becomes more and more unresponsive the longer you keep it running, and why you end up eeding to restart your computer periodically.
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Heh.

Yeah, gotta restart *Windows* because *applications* leak memory. What about just restarting FF and IE? :-P

Once you determine which process is using more virtual memory than it should, you need to determine what the process is. Some are pretty obvious, like winword.exe is Microsoft Word, iexplore.exe is Internet Explorer, and so on. Others aren't so obvious. The best way to determine the source of a specific process is to use a search engine to search for the Image Name as shown in Task Manager.
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Which usually gives way too many junk hits these days :(. Protip: select "properties" for the process in task manager, and then "general" tab will show you the location of the process... often more useful than sifting through the junk search results.

Also: install sysinternals' Process Explorer instead of the cruddy old task manager, it's so much better :)

Tinman57:

Also: install sysinternals' Process Explorer instead of the cruddy old task manager, it's so much better :)
-f0dder (December 22, 2012, 11:31 AM)
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  Yes sir, that's what I use....

f0dder:
Microsoft have improved the task manager a lot in Win8, though - on that OS, I wouldn't recommend normal people to install Process Explorer. Not that I'd recommend against it, it's just that it does so much that ProcExp isn't really necessary. Once in a while, the behemoth does something right :P

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