Windows 10 – ‘Your computer is low on memory’ alert message is displayed randomly.

Hi Aravind,

Thank you for posting in Microsoft Community, we appreciate your interest in Windows 10.  

I understand the inconvenience that you are facing on Windows 10, we will certainly help you with this issue.

The computer hard drive needs certain space to run certain programs, such as the internet, installers, updaters and what not. When your computer is low on memory, it means that you’ve filled up most of the RAM. You can view how much you have by following these steps; 

I suggest you to change the size of virtual memory and check if it helps.

To change the size of virtual memory follow the steps below:

1. Right click on This PC.
2. Go to Advance System Settings.
3. On the Advanced tab, under Performance, click Settings.
4. Click the Advanced tab, and then, under Virtual memory, click Change.
5. Clear the Automatically manage paging file size for all drives check box.
6. Under Drive [Volume Label], click the drive that contains the paging file you want to change.
7. Click Custom size, type a new size in megabytes in the Initial size (MB) or Maximum size (MB) box.
8. Click Set and then click OK.

I would also suggest you to check if a program overuses memory

If the computer becomes low on memory whenever you run certain programs, one or more of those programs might have a memory leak. To stop a memory leak, you need to close the program. To repair a memory leak, you need to check for updates for the program or contact the publisher of the software.

To determine which program is using the most memory, follow these steps:

1. Press Ctrl + Alt + Delete key to open Task Manager.
2. Click the Processes tab.
3. To sort programs by memory usage, click Memory.

Hope it helps, reply to us with the status of your issue. We will be happy to assist you.

Thank you.

How is that a solution when it only says “type a new size” without giving any guidance on how to choose the correct size?

I don’t think just typing any random number is going to fix the issue.

How do you choose a size that will prevent the issue and why doesn’t Windows manage it properly so you don’t need to tinker with making custom sizes?

Hi Aravind,

Thank you for posting in Microsoft Community, we appreciate your interest in Windows 10.  

I understand the inconvenience that you are facing on Windows 10, we will certainly help you with this issue.

The computer hard drive needs certain space to run certain programs, such as the internet, installers, updaters and what not. When your computer is low on memory, it means that you’ve filled up most of the RAM. You can view how much you have by following these steps; 

I suggest you to change the size of virtual memory and check if it helps.

To change the size of virtual memory follow the steps below:

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1. Right click on This PC.
2. Go to Advance System Settings.
3. On the Advanced tab, under Performance, click Settings.
4. Click the Advanced tab, and then, under Virtual memory, click Change.
5. Clear the Automatically manage paging file size for all drives check box.
6. Under Drive [Volume Label], click the drive that contains the paging file you want to change.
7. Click Custom size, type a new size in megabytes in the Initial size (MB) or Maximum size (MB) box.
8. Click Set and then click OK.

I would also suggest you to check if a program overuses memory

If the computer becomes low on memory whenever you run certain programs, one or more of those programs might have a memory leak. To stop a memory leak, you need to close the program. To repair a memory leak, you need to check for updates for the program or contact the publisher of the software.

To determine which program is using the most memory, follow these steps:

1. Press Ctrl + Alt + Delete key to open Task Manager.
2. Click the Processes tab.
3. To sort programs by memory usage, click Memory.

Hope it helps, reply to us with the status of your issue. We will be happy to assist you.

Thank you.

Really?  You called this HELP?  So, what value do I put in the initial size and maximum size?

I have performed every single troubleshooting tip listed in this thread, none has solved the issue.

I am getting this exact same “low memory error” repeatedly though I have a lot of free memory each time it pop’s up. I have run the suggested solutions to no avail.

Running latest version of Windows 10 all updates installed brand new $2,400 A740 Lenovo All-In-One PC.

This occurs during simple web browsing with even 2 windows open and no other programs running.

Hi Aravind,

Thank you for posting in Microsoft Community, we appreciate your interest in Windows 10.  

I understand the inconvenience that you are facing on Windows 10, we will certainly help you with this issue.

The computer hard drive needs certain space to run certain programs, such as the internet, installers, updaters and what not. When your computer is low on memory, it means that you’ve filled up most of the RAM. You can view how much you have by following these steps; 

I suggest you to change the size of virtual memory and check if it helps.

To change the size of virtual memory follow the steps below:

1. Right click on This PC.
2. Go to Advance System Settings.
3. On the Advanced tab, under Performance, click Settings.
4. Click the Advanced tab, and then, under Virtual memory, click Change.
5. Clear the Automatically manage paging file size for all drives check box.
6. Under Drive [Volume Label], click the drive that contains the paging file you want to change.
7. Click Custom size, type a new size in megabytes in the Initial size (MB) or Maximum size (MB) box.
8. Click Set and then click OK.

I would also suggest you to check if a program overuses memory

If the computer becomes low on memory whenever you run certain programs, one or more of those programs might have a memory leak. To stop a memory leak, you need to close the program. To repair a memory leak, you need to check for updates for the program or contact the publisher of the software.

To determine which program is using the most memory, follow these steps:

1. Press Ctrl + Alt + Delete key to open Task Manager.
2. Click the Processes tab.
3. To sort programs by memory usage, click Memory.

Hope it helps, reply to us with the status of your issue. We will be happy to assist you.

Thank you.

Thanks again, for nothing!

This so called help is completely useless, thanks for nothing.

Same problem here, and there are at least 100 people in the Windows 10 Feedback Hub with the same issue. None of the solutions posted here work.

I’m running the latest Slow Ring build.

This problem happened to me today with my recently-upgraded Windows 10 installation (never had it happen with Windows 7).  After a lot of hunting, I found out the cause (and a temporary solution).  Here’s how you can do what I did:

Open Task Manager, and go to the Details tab (But you may need to click “More details” before you can do that).  Now right-click top of the list where it says Name, Status, etc.  Choose “select columns”, which should open a new window.  Scroll-down the list of choices until you find “Commit size”, and tick that.  Then OK you change.  You should now see a new column labelled “Commit size”.

Now here’s the bit of magic.  Click once on the “Commit size” column, so that the processes with the highest Commit size are at the top.  I found that one particular task had 20GB of memory Commited, even though it’s Memory column showed hardly any usage at all.  This caused my system’s Paging file size to become 26GB in size (once other memory usage was included), at which point my smallish C: partition ran out of disk space (less than 1GB was free), and Windows started to give me panicky messages about running out of memory.

So the message is misleading.  It means you are running out of disk space for the Paging file (or have manually limited the Paging file size).

In my case the offending task was called something like Windows compatibility telemetry collector (I didn’t take a note of the name), so I just killed it, and then Windows was finally happy 🙂 .  I’ve seen this process running quite often, and I had not shutdown for some days (as I’ve started Hibernating my system, rather than Shutting Down, just like I used to do with Windows 7), so I suspect this Windows 10 process is buggy & ends-up using an unlimited amount of memory in some cases (I have tons of programs installed, not to mention some soft links in the Start Menu, so that maybe it gets confused by one or more of them).

Very helpful response @Chr1sH ,

you’d think Microsoft could have figured this out.

UPDATE: This did not fix the issue.

So I think I fixed this problem on my Sony Vaio Fit 15E, because I was getting this error several times a week and haven’t gotten it since I made these changes last week.

Short story: update your BIOS, drivers, and all software that shipped with your PC that runs in the background (e.g. Vaio Care, Dell SystemDetect, etc.).

You can find the above at your PC OEM’s support site. Open Device Manager in Windows and literally manually check driver version numbers between your PC and the support site. If the support site has a higher version number, download and install it. If your OEM shipped an updater for their software, run that too.

Basically this isn’t a Microsoft problem or Windows bug, it’s OEM software/drivers/BIOS versions that are incompatible with the build of Windows 10 you’re running.

I’m going to do some more testing and see if this is that actual solution, but so far it’s working for me.