Symptoms

The error message at recognition logs "The paging file is too small for this operation to complete."

Cause

To increase pagefile size, required.

Resolution

The Windows Pagefile is used for virtual memory operations by the Windows kernel.

Windows pagefile sizes are set during installation, and normally do not have to be changed. However, if you add memory to your system after initialization, you may need to increase the “initial pagefile size” on the primary boot drive. This is especially true if you’re trying to get a kernel memory dump to diagnose a problem.

If your pagefile is too small, you may get a memory.dmp file, but Debugging Tools for Windows won’t be able to read it. Even if you don’t intend to examine the dump yourself, you still might want to give it to someone else! On systems with solid-state disks (SSDs or NVMe drives), your system administrator might have limited the size to reduce wear on the disk — but this can prevent analysis later.

It’s rather involved to change the sizes, so here are step-by-step procedures, one for Windows 10, another for older versions of Windows.

To change the Pagefile size:
Windows 10
On Windows 10, you can get directly to system properties from the task bar, but then you have to traverse several dialogs.

Press the Windows key.
Type “SystemPropertiesAdvanced”. (You can type all in lower case, too: “systempropertiesadvanced”.) You’ll see this:

Click on “Run as administrator.” You’ll see the advanced properties page:

Click on “Settings..” You’ll see the performance options tab.

Select the “Advanced” tab. You’ll see the following panel.,

Select “Change…”. You’ll see the following panel.

Please, make sure the checkbox “Automatically managing paging file size for all drives” is not checked, as shown above. Then select “Custom size:” and fill in an appropriate size. (If you are doing this because of a message from “How to Enable Kernel Memory Dumps”, be sure to select the drive mentioned in the alert box, and also set the initial size according to the alert box.)

Press “Set”, press “Ok”, then exit from the Virtual Memory, Performance Options, and Systems Properties Dialog.

After that, please, reboot your system.