by David Hakala

When you start a large program, such as Microsoft Office components including Word, Excel, or Outlook, you may experience very slow startup of the program, a thrashing sound from your hard drive; and the following message:

Your system is low on virtual memory. To ensure that Windows runs properly, increase the size of your virtual memory paging file. For more information, see Help.

After you click “OK”, you may see this further information:

Your system is low on virtual memory. Windows is increasing the size of your virtual memory paging file. During this process, memory requests for some applications may be denied. For more information, see Help.

We don’t want to see Help for more information; we want our program to load faster and our hard drive to stop tearing itself apart. So let’s quickly summarize what Help would tell us and get on with the fix.
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