I get a message from windows saying virtual minimum to low... does this mean i need to add more memory to my rig? and when i play a game called battlefield:vietnam i gets like twitchy when i turn on like a helicopter or tank but not on humvee's. sysytem specs: pentium4 2.6 HT, 512mb that came stock with my hp pavilion and 512mb of corsair value memory,6800 ultra,500watt x connect psu, 5400 rpm seagate 120 hdd
It means what it says. Your virtual memory is too low. Usually Windows will use up all your physical memory first, and then when thats filled up, it starts to use some space on your harddrive that is set aside to act as "virtual memory" aka pagefile. If windows says the pagefile/virtual memory is low, then that means all the physical memory has been used up and its eaten up all the allocated pagefile. To manually set the size for pagefile, Right-click my computer > properties > advanced > performance > advanced > change. iirc windows sets the pagefile at ~1.5x the size of physical memory and will expand it up to 2.5x the size of physical memory if it runs out (and thus lags your computer while expanding it!). Battlefield Vietnam is a VERY CPU and memory intensive game. Having alot of memory will give this game a substantial boost. From my experiences 1gb should be fine for BF:V, and 512mb is sometimes not enough. Windows usually allocates the focused program the most physical memory, and moves the memory from applications in the background from the physical memory to the pagefile, to optimise performance of the focussed program. Closing whatever you have open before launching the game may or may not cure the "joltyness" of such situations as you explained, but i find this is usually a problem on BF:V when playing on a computer with a minimal amount of ram (e.g. 256mb) as most of the game is stored on pagefile and makes it run very slow indeed!.
thanks, it says initial size(MB):1536 Maximum Sixe(MB):3072 what should i chage it to and is it safe let me know.
You could try increasing the maximum size to say.. 4000MB or so, but those values sound fine already. Plus it's never a good thing to use page file instead of physical memory, which is probably the cause of your twitchyness. Increasing the page file might make the error message go away but you'll still get jerkiness. Is there hard drive access when the game lags? What res you running? maybe try lowering the res/detail a little, or buy more ram.
tbh, I would invest in a faster hard drive. Keep the 120GB as a secondary drive, and get a 7200RPM drive, probably IDE if you're using the standard HP mobo too, and use it as your primary drive. I would also get more and faster RAM, as the HP stuff is probably high-latency PC2700 shite