How to get warned when your PC is running out of memory

A memory alert in Pulse by Zaweba does exactly this job. On its Alerts page you set a percentage and a number of minutes, and when memory use stays above that percentage for that long, Pulse sends a Windows notification. The defaults are 90 per cent for five minutes, which catches a real shortage without reacting to every brief spike.

Running short of memory is one of the commonest reasons a PC feels slow. Windows starts moving things out to the disk, programs take longer to switch, and eventually something may close. A warning gives you the chance to act first.

Setting up the alert

Open Pulse and go to the Alerts page with Ctrl+4 or from the View menu. Find the memory alert. The percentage can be set anywhere from 50 to 99, and the number of minutes from 1 to 120.

The minutes setting is the clever part. Memory use jumps about all the time as programs open and close. Asking for it to stay high for several minutes means you only hear about a lasting problem. If you'd like an earlier warning, lower the percentage; if you get notices you don't need, raise the minutes.

Pulse has to be running to watch. Closing the window keeps it in the tray, and "Start Pulse when I sign in" in Settings starts it there every time.

What the notification looks like

Like all of Pulse's alerts, it fires once and then re-arms when memory returns to normal, so you won't get a stream of pop-ups. It appears as a Windows notification from Pulse's tray icon and goes into the Alert log on the Alerts page with the date, time and message, so you can see it later if you were away.

Finding what is using the memory

When the alert arrives, open the Live page (Ctrl+1) and click the Memory column heading. It sorts biggest first. The figure is each app's private working set, the memory it is using for itself, and every process of one program is added into a single row. That's important for browsers, which spread themselves over many processes; Pulse shows the total for the whole program.

The Memory graph at the top of the Live page shows "used of total" as a caption, so you can see how close to the limit you are.

Freeing memory up

Often the fix is simple: close tabs you aren't using, or quit a program you've finished with. If an app's memory keeps growing for no reason, it may have a fault; restarting it usually helps for a while. In Pulse, select the row and choose End task to close every process of that app after a confirmation. Save your work in that program first.

The History page (Ctrl+3) helps with the longer view. Its CPU and memory graph for today, yesterday or this week shows whether memory creeps up through the day, and Pulse stores each busy app's peak memory every minute. If you regularly hit the limit doing ordinary work, the PC may simply need more memory, and Pulse by Zaweba gives you the evidence to decide.