EDIT: I ended up doing a combo of both suggested answers, and thus answered my own question, it is the accepted one below, hopefully this helps others in the future!

I'm running 32 bit Java 1.8.0\_40 on Windows 7. 

I have created a program in Netbeans 8.0 and adjusted the VM Options to be -Xms512m -Xmx2048m.

The program runs quite well inside the Netbeans IDE environment, however upon trying to run the program outside of Netbeans I encounter a heap space out of memory error. 

EDIT: I am launching the program via the .jar file that Netbeans creates for the project upon compilation.

I have gone to the Java control panel and applied the same "-Xms512m -Xmx2048m" information to the Runtime Parameters. I am still encountering the heap space out of memory error. 

Any suggestions? Where can I go from here? Have I missed a step in making sure there is enough memory in the Runtime Environment outside of Netbeans?