“Not enough memory…” error when attempting to start windows phone emulator

Question

I actually got this error (image below) sometimes (not always), which means my hardware is fine (?).

Everytime I got this error I tried a walk around by starting the VM inside HyperV Manager (After upgrading to Windows 8.1, unable to run Windows Phone emulator without memory error).

But now, even when I started it, it still didn't work (image below).

The errors occurred when I started using Application Deployment to test a xap file in WVGA (not WVGA 512 MB) emulator, the emulator didn't start and after that whatever version of Emulator I tried, the same error appeared.

I tried deleting all the VMs in VM Manager and then started VS and run the emulator again but it still didn't work. I also restarted windows but the problem remained unsolved. I'm using VS2012 and Windows 8.1.

Answer 1

The primary reason behind this is that your machine doesn't have enough available memory for the VM to launch.

Here is a KB article that was recently posted to get around this by setting a registry key that limits the amount of memory available to the host machine.

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2911380/en-us

I have used the above fix and it worked for me.

Answer 2

This message is telling you that you have insufficient memory on your PC to start this virtual machine.

Try closing down other applications (such as Visual Studio, any Office apps etc), then starting the emulator in Hyper-V manager. Then you can restart Visual Studio etc.

I've noticed this seems to happen to me more often under Windows 8.1 than I remember happening under Windows 8 on a 4GB RAM laptop.