computer shutdown dureing game

Could well have been overheating.

 

unlikely if its a laptop.

 

I discounted a blue screen because it would have rebooted, not powered off.

 

no, it would start swapping and would slow down drastically.

 

Basically a computer can store data in two ways, in memory and on the harddisk. Storing things in memory is many, many times faster than on the harddisk, but say you have 512MB RAM and you have processes running that need to store 600MB of data, then it can't fit in memory, so the program stores it on the harddisk instead. This means that every time it has to use that data it has to read from the harddisk instead of the memory, and this is so much slower that a computer will usually come to a crawl and work very, very slowly.

So the process of swapping is when it's using the harddisk instead of the memory.

 

If you turn on 'view hidden files and folders' and turn off 'hide protected operating system files' on your computer, then look inside C:, you will see a massive file called pagefile.sys, which its double the size of the amount of ram you have. This is a pagefile/swapfile, which is basically an area of the hard disk used for what Seph explained; as if it was RAM. (it's often called virtual memory). A good OS would never use the swapfile until you have almost run out of physical ram, but Windows uses it all the time. (this is what people are talking about when they're complaining about Windows memory management). For example:



Here we have a screenshot from my computer. As you can see, I have 8GB of RAM, of which 7GB is available, yet the pagefile is still 832MB used, of which 65MB is windows core data (which will have to be retrieved if needed). Since I have 7GB free ram, there is absolutely no need for the pagefile to have anything in it at all.

Now, compare that to an OS which manages its memory properly:

Code:

[root@db2 ~]# free
             total       used       free     shared    buffers     cached
Mem:       2062252    1638380     423872          0     179340    1004628
-/+ buffers/cache:     454412    1607840
Swap:      2031608          0    2031608

What this shows is a system with 2GB physical ram, of which 423MB is free. The swapfile(=pagefile) is, however, completely unused.

If you manage to use up all the swapfile as well as all the physical ram, the system will crash.

 

dust doesn't absorb electricity...