How do I suppress "low memory" warnings in Vista Home Premium when running without paging file?

A few weeks ago I disabled all paging files on my Media Center. I figured that it only ever runs AVG, Media Center, Logmein, Chrome and sundry services to support these and never gets above 1.4-1.5 GB of physical memory used, so what harm could it do? Overall this has worked splendidly, and the lack of drive thrashing is a revelation.

However, Windows insists on popping up warnings about the system being low on memory, despite there never being less than about 450 MB of free RAM. Now I know why it does this, and luckily the popups don't interfere with Media Center (otherwise the wife would definitely have something to say about it!), but every time I drop back to the desktop to do a bit of couch surfing there is a warning dialog.

Is there a way I can basically tell Windows:

"Yes, I know there isn't much physical RAM left, but I'm a big boy now and I know what I'm doing so let it be my funeral if some wayward process eats up all my spare RAM"

Solution 1:

Open the registry editor (click the Windows orb, type “regedit”, and hit Enter).

Browse to

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\WDI\DiagnosticModules\

Export the following folders. This is your backup in case something goes wrong.

  {5EE64AFB-398D-4edb-AF71-3B830219ABF7}

  {45DE1EA9-10BC-4f96-9B21-4B6B83DBF476}

  {C0F51D84-11B9-4e74-B083-99F11BA2DB0A}

Take ownership of the each folder mentioned in step 3. (You can take ownership by right clicking the folder and then hitting permissions. Click the Advanced button and change owner to your user. Click OK and then give full control to your user group. Hit OK again.)

Delete the folders from step 3.

Reboot and enjoy.

Warning: After doing the above steps, you should know that once memory runs out, it is out. You will have no warning. Once your memory gets maxed out, programs will behave very erratic and suddenly crash without warning. I’ve decided that this side effect can be just as annoying as the popups. If you consistently push your machine’s memory to its limits, you should think twice about disabling the low memory messages.

Source

Of course you can always restore the 3 folders from the backup and Windows Vista will happily warn you again :)

PS: This works for Windows 7 as well.