how stupid is this!

alright, well im playing CSS and i get this popup (didnt see it till i exited the game) from windows. it says: close hl2.exe because your system is low on memory, to prevent data loss, etc...

i dont even know what to say to that

i really thought 2GB was enough for vista

 

increase your virutal memory size,
and make sure to end as many processes as safely possible from the task manager

 

Looks to me like a "big brother" warning like Vista seems to have a lot of, security, safety, stability and most of all annoying! Seems to me your systems memory spiked once and nothing happened but for that ms something went to use RAM and it wasn't there. No big deal, I would check apps and processes, and look at VM but if they are set fine I would leave alone. Unless you are crunching critical #'s for some critical application I would not worry. If you work for the Defense Department and are working on some missile guidance system quality checks, maybe you should not game on the system at the same time. Word and Office apps are backed up periodically anyway, so what is the risk? Vista is like a spouse that nags. That is my opinion but of course more RAM or changing VM could help, but I would not even care unless my game was slowing down because of it, or crashing, short of that it sounds like MS bloatware OS called Vista doing what it does. I am surprised it does not warn you of the dangers of allowing caching for “write to disk” I mean if something happens to power you could lose data, that would be a nice warning. Nothing happened right? No data loss? No problem?

 

lol, alright, but still, thats really dumb.... i even have readyboost going too with a 1GB memory stick :/

 

I soooo...agree it is dumb, you only saw it when you exited the game. Lot of good that does you if there was a problem and you crashed. Bill Cosby yous to have a bit where he talked about “dip” signs in the road. Just when you saw the sign “bam” you hit it. He said it would be better if they put the sign after and informed you that you had just hit a “dip”. Sounds kind of the same to me. Useless.

 

Before even clicking on the thread, I knew which OS it dealt with by reading the title. Good old resource-robbing Vista!

 

Is your Windows install up to date?

Have you installed this?
RAM Hotfix

And this?
Performance Updates

And the previous advice about increasing your paging file size is a good idea. I suggest you make it at least twice the size of your RAM.