RAM prices have soared in the last year, and what used to be an inexpensive component to upgrade now can cost as much as a GPU used to. If your PC is running low on RAM, there are a few things you can do to mitigate the problem.
Increase your virtual memory space
Almost as good as adding RAM
If your PC actually runs out of RAM, your PC will lag, freeze, or even crash completely.
To prevent that from happening, Windows (and other operating systems) reserve a small amount of space on your storage drive to act as virtual memory. That virtual memory can be written to much like RAM, and in an emergency, it’ll allow your PC to keep running where it would have otherwise become completely inoperable.
When PCs still used mechanical hard drives for their boot drives, virtual memory tended to be extremely slow, which meant that the performance hit you’d take using it was enormous. It was literally limited by the speed the disc could spin at and how fast the arm could move.
Solid-state drives (SSDs) have improved the situation quite a bit. Even SATA SSDs can move several hundred megabytes of data per second, and some PCIe NVMe SSDs have transfer rates measured in the gigabytes per second. Today, the fastest PCIe 5.0 SSDs are theoretically faster than DDR4, though real-world constraints often mean that NVMe drives are still somewhat slower.
Whatever SSD you’re using, virtual memory can meaningfully improve your performance if you’re using a PC with limited RAM but a fast internal drive.
Increasing the size of the Page File
To increase the size of your Page File on Windows 11, open the Settings app by pressing Windows+i, then navigate to System > About > Advanced system settings. Within the System Properties window, click the Advanced tab, then click Settings (under Performance), and select the Advanced tab in the new window.
Finally, click Change under Virtual Memory. From there, you just need to disable the default system settings by unchecking Automatically manage paging file sizes for all drives at the top and selecting Custom Size towards the bottom.
Windows will tell you the minimum and recommended sizes at the bottom, but if you want to allocate more, you can as long as you have the free space on your drive. Mine was set to 2048MB by default, so I upped it to 8192MB (8GB) instead.
Disable unnecessary startup applications
No one wanted Teams to launch automatically
Whenever you install a new application on Windows, you’re usually given the option to add it to the start menu or the desktop, and sometimes, you’re given the option to have the application start whenever your PC boots up.
Unfortunately, some apps will add themselves to the auto startup list without ever asking you.
If your PC is low on RAM, preventing applications from automatically launching is the first thing you should try.
Remove automatic startup applications
To disable Startup Applications, press Ctrl+Shift+Esc, then go to the Startup apps tab. From there, you can right-click apps and select Disable to turn them off.
If you find that you miss something starting automatically, you can always come back and re-enable them.
Double-check Task Scheduler
Scheduled tasks can eat up RAM when you least expect it
Unfortunately, not every application that will automatically start is listed in the Startup Apps menu in the Task Manager. Some applications use the Task Scheduler instead. The Task Scheduler can be used to launch an application at a specific time, after certain conditions have been met, or a set time after a restart.
Normally, Task Scheduler is used to ensure updates are downloaded and installed in a timely fashion, or that certain routine maintenance occurs when it should. Those are both important, and I wouldn’t recommend disabling them unless you need to.
Unfortunately, if your PC doesn’t have any RAM to spare, an unexpected update can mean the difference between a PC that is working as expected and a PC that is laggy.
If you’re really short on RAM, you can go through Task Scheduler and remove anything you don’t want to run automatically. However, you will probably need to perform those updates manually whenever you use the program instead.
Removing a scheduled job from the Task Scheduler
To remove a scheduled task, press the Windows key and search for Task Scheduler, then launch the application.
Open up the folder hierarchy on the left and go through the scheduled jobs one-by-one. When you find one you want to disable, right-click it and select Disable. Don’t delete it. If you delete it, you’ll need to manually recreate the task if you ever want to reenable it, which can be tedious.
Don’t delete essential Windows services to save RAM
If you’ve disabled every app you can, gone through the Task Scheduler, and increased your paging file size and you’re still having RAM issues, you have one choice left: Start removing apps to guarantee they can’t run. In the case of Windows services, you probably can’t remove them completely, but you can disable them in the Services app.
Stephan is the sports journalist for the Maple Grove Report.
