How to Prevent Irritating System Error Messages like “Out of Memory” by Increasing Desktop Heap


Some applications with numerous windows are already running and this is what happens when you start another program: Windows refuses to open it, showing an error message which says “Out of memory”. But the Task Manager shows sufficient physical memory and swap space

The system intermediate memory, “Desktop heap”, which is too small by default, is probably responsible for this – Windows again tampers with its history here. Windows uses the heap for managing the open applications. There are problems if too many windows are open.

The behavior can also be prompted: about fifty instances of Internet Explorer can be shown; all other windows are disfigured or not displayed at all by Windows. The size of the heap is defined in the registry, independent of the main and virtual memory. Increase the value to use more programs at the same time. For this,

prevent irritating error messages and work safely

  • Start the registry editor with “Start > Run”, “regedit” and [Enter] and
  • Open the key

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\System\CurrentControlSet\Control\Session Manager\SubSystems.

  • Double-click the “Windows” entry on the right.
  • A long function call appears as a character string. In this, look for the “SharedSection” parameter. It determines the system and desktop heap in this format: SharedSection-xxxx,yyyy
  • You will see “xxxx” for the maximum size of the heap in the entire system and “yyyy” for the size of the heap per desktop, each in KB.
  • You only need to increase the value for the desktop by 256 or 512 KB to prevent the annoying error messages from showing.

Note: Do not forget to restart your system so that the changes have the desired effect.

Also check out how to free system resources to speed up important programs

Filed under: Windows XP
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June 17, 2009 by: Prasanth Chandra

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