Insufficient memory?

[Eris]

Hi guys. I bought a new laptop and TS4 last week, but I got a little nostalgic and started playing TS3 again as well (my old laptop couldn't handle all the EP's). I installed everything again except UL and IP, since those I bought digitally from Origin and didn't want to wait for them to re-download. I started playing and it works great: no lagging, great graphics, no crashes, etc. However, I get a message from Windows saying that the Memory is insufficient and that closing the game is advised (or something like that) and gives me the option to to close the game or click Cancel. The game doesn't crash and continues to work fine, and if I click on Cancel nothing happens, but I'm wondering what this is? The laptop is above minimum requirements: It's a 64-bit Windows 8.1 with 8GB RAM, a 2.60 GHz i5 processor, 750 GB hard drive space (almost empty except for the game), and an NVIDIA Geforce 820M graphics card (2GB). The laptop model is MSi CX61 2PC. I installed everything in the correct order, patched up and optimized the game via the NVIDIA Geforce control panel.

Right now it's not a real problem since it doesn't actually affect the game, but I'm intrigued and also worried that it might start to cause me more trouble in the future. Any ideas?

[Devin]

Are you shutting down your background tasks prior to loading the game? I know that this will run the game more smoothly, but it might also prevent you from getting the error when you're playing. Some of those background tasks eat up a lot of memory.

[MrsFlynn]

Hi Eris,

Something you can try is making sure The Sims 3 is running on the dedicated graphics card and not the built-in card. Crinrict has a post that explains how to do that.

http://sims3.crinrict.com/en/2013/06/getting-the-game-to-recognize-your-card.html

Hopefully this helps,

MrsFlynn

[Eris]

Thanks for the tips I've been playing some more and it hasn't happened again - it might have just been a bug, or maybe some other program was running in the background before  I'll try your ideas if I get the error again.

[pepoluan]

My guess is that Windows complained about "virtual memory too low".

In that case, no need to worry. Windows will increase virtual memory size automatically. There will be a performance hit during the process, that's why Windows suggested you to close the game.