Expand your Mind

Q: I have a 60 gig hard drive and 128 megabytes of RAM, but I get messages that say that I don’t have enough memory. I have windows XP on my computer. I download a lot of music and videos, and also make movies using Windows Movie Maker. Sometimes I only have about 8 gigs of disk space so I delete some files. My computer also runs really slow even when I don’t get the message. My question is how can I fix this problem?
J.S.
A: Believe it or not computers have feelings too and they shouldn’t be abused. O. K. they don’t have feelings, but that still doesn’t mean that you should abuse them. Your apparent favorite pastime seems to bear some of the burden for your computer ills. I’m sure that you know that downloading music and video files is an easy way to use up a lot of disk space, quickly.
There are a few options to remedy your malady. The first option is the easiest; do not have more than one program running at one time. This will give you a measure of computer speed, but it can become less effective with the more music and video files that you download. The next thing that you could do would be to purge files that you no longer use anymore from your system. If you can not bear the thought of parting with your beloved files, then you may want to transfer them to compact disc. This will allow you to free up space on your hard drive while retaining the files that have downloaded.
Another option at your disposal is to increase the amount of virtual memory on your computer. You stated that you have 128 megabytes of RAM on your computer. Virtual memory is a portion of your hard drive that is set aside to compensate for not having enough RAM. The virtual memory can be increased to provide an extra amount of relief from the lack of memory issues that you are facing. To change the virtual memory you must click the start button and go to “control panel”. From there you would want to select “performance and maintenance”. The “system” icon at the bottom of the screen is the next selection. Once you are in the systems’ menu, you should see a dialog box appear with various tabs. Select the tab to the right that is labeled “advanced”. Then you can go to the area called “performance” and click the “settings” button. You will then see another box appear, and once again select the tab labeled “advanced”. It is at the bottom of this box that the area labeled “virtual memory” resides. You can click the “change” button and you should be able to reset your virtual memory to about a max of 288 megabytes.
The final option is to add more RAM to your computer. The virtual memory instructions listed above are for the XP version of Windows. As always, email me your questions.