Hey Jerry:
I was having the same issue on both my WIN10 desktop and laptop. For me the problem extended to any software which was demanded a heavy processing and/or memory load. It was tremendously frustrating and I couldn’t find answers anywhere, that despite my black belt in Google-Fu!
Then, one glorious day, I found a post on some help-desk forum board, somewhere I can’t remember. A post which offered a suggestion which I had never seen before. It took approximately 3 1/8 minutes to complete for each computer, something that made me instantly dubious it would do anything. That was 2 months ago, and both computers are operating at speeds not seen before, and notta one program has crashed on either.
I never found an explanation regarding why this was somehow adjusted, because I can guarantee I had never been to this particular settings page before on any computer. Somehow, on both machines, the allocated virtual memory was set so low that an Apple IIe would have crashed! If you are unfamiliar with how to check for this issue, you’re in luck. Here’s the steps:
- Click the “Windows” Button in the lower left corner of your desktop
- Select the system settings gear
- Select the “System” Icon
- Scroll the left panel menu down to the bottom and select “About” icon
- In the upper right hand corner under the Related Settings header, locate and select the text “System Info”
- On the left side of the window which pops up, at the bottom, select the text “Advanced System Settings”
- In the small pop-up window, select the “Advanced” tab
- In the top section labeled “Performance”, select the “Settings” button
- In the small pop-up window, select the “Advanced” tab
- In the section labeled “Virtual memory”, select the “Change” button
In the final pop-up, you will be able to determine how much virtual memory your system is able to access. There are three options for virtual memory, “Custom”, “System Managed”, and “No Paging”. I found my first computer with “Custom” selected, however the minimum, or initial size box was empty, and the maximum size was a meager 2400 MB. I found the second one set to “System Managed” however the amount of memory indicated below was roughly 2700 MB.
I decided to take the advice of this forum post and set both computers to “Custom”. In the initial size, I entered “3000”, and in the maximum I entered “30000”. I did this based on both indicating there was over 64000MB space available.
I don’t know why they were set like that, I don’t know if the sizes I entered into the initial and maximum boxes would be considered inefficient or if Microsoft would recommend I do something else. I do know, however, that ever since I did that, I’ve never been happier with either machine.
If you try this, I truly hope you see the same results. Stupid computers being stupid is why these things get punted into the streets. Good Luck!