I have a very fast 512 mb of memory on my laptop machine and every once in a while when I change the explorer browser page I get a message saying I am out of memory and something about it that could not be read!

What's the fix, if any?

Joe: Does this happen when you have many programs open at the same time?

Ryan: No, I sometimes link to images pages after my search for electrical pictures and when I go to click the x top right the messages comes up and it crashes. This happens on two of my three laptops running XP?

Joe

Does this happen after the computer has been on for a long period of time? Even though you close programs some of them have problems releasing the memory they were using and the only way to get it back is reboot. If you hit ctrl-alt-delete it will bring up a window showing what programs are running and how much memory they are using. You might want to run Ad-aware, Spybot or similar program to make sure some uninvited program is making use of your system. I guess your virtual memory setting could be messed up but unlikely if you haven’t been adjusting it.

Curt

Thanks, I will run ad ware, and my computer is usually on most of the day, and when the problems arise I have reboot after the drives spin down and asks me if I want to report it, I say no I don't, and if I did what good does it do anyway?

When will there be a foolproof system?

Joe,

Before you do the warmboot (restart Winders), take a look at the available resources to see what it says.
Do this by right-clicking on the "My Computer" Icon, then select the "Properties" part at the bottom of the drop-down list. After selecting this, click on the "Performance" tab - the one to the extreme right side, and see what the available resources are - in percentage.
Should be the same / similar for XP (I'll check this on my Wife's machine).

Another helpful thing to have running would be the System Resources monitor(s). These can show when resources are dropping and what resources are being used often / frequently.

Might need to allocate more memory space to your Browser's Cache (disk and DRAM), physically purge the Caches (empty them), or do some patch updates.

With 512 MB of DRAM and an endless level of Disk Cache (Virtural Memory), you should not run low on memory space until you are multitasking quite a lot of stuff, printing to several printers and moving files to other W/S on a LAN - all at the same time.
Speed will suffer drastically when DRAM is limited and Disk Cache is "abused". You will also notice excessive Disk accessing during this time.

Maybe the message is "Not Real" - like IE thinks there is less than 10% available resources during this transition period?

I haven't seen one of those for a long time!
Used to get them when running long sessions of AutoCAD, Word, Excel, Acrobat, Photoshop + Scanning stuff (all within the same sessions), without a "Refreshing Warmboot" for over 10 hours.

Prior "Memory Overfloweth" error messages came in the DOS only days of yore
Back in 1993, used to get that transient "DOS Memory Overflow" error message when trying to cram Real Mode Applications into ~640K + maybe a little bit of UMB!
(Tweeks for this were - of course - the multiboot options!).

Scott35

I have been experiencing the exact same problem for the last 3 weeks - with DSL and a 512 as well. It is frustrating as sometimes it will disconnect me from the browser.

Pierre

This is kind of a hidden windows program that will give a lot of info on what running and what not, and will allow you to turn them off and back on ( after a reboot ), it works with windows XP and maybe 2000.

Click start then go to "run" once open, type msconfig . This will open a systems file that will allow you to see what programs are loading up when you start your machine. Be careful what you turn off in the "Services tab" you may stop windows from running. you can shut down anything you want in the "Startup tab" this will only effect programs like your firewall, ad killer, Real player and stuff like that. Remember what you turn off so that you may turn it back on ( another reboot will be needed ). Also this program will sometime nag you on start up to run it again, if so check the box in the window of the nag and it will go away. You may be surprise to see how much junk you'll have in your "startup tab" .

I've been through all of this. I had msconfig on my desktop and ran it daily, and did the cntl-alt-del every hour or two. Six months ago, I gave up.

Linux isn't perfect and there is a learning curve, but it's a lot better than what I had.

Apparently there is a demo available at
knoppix
I'm told you can burn it to a cd and boot from the cd.

Thanks for the information, I will check it out.

msinfo32 is another helpful file, you run in the same way msconfig. You will not find out about these files in any microsoft booklets for windows, why? I don't know maybe they think we will just be confused.

You know what the say about microsoft..
"if microsoft made a shop vac....it would be the only thing they made that did not suck."

Not sure if this is still applies in XP, but Windows has a System Information utility as well: Start->Programs->Accessories->System Tools->System Information.

You may find that it's a certain piece of software that is reserving great chunks of memory for itself and not releasing them, as suggested above.

I had a similar problem with very slow operation at times and then crashes with "No memory." I finally traced it to a little utility I was using (RAM audio to WAV file converter) that was hogging every scrap of RAM it could find and not relinquishing it upon termination.

I tried all of the files and they all worked, but I am not sure about which files I can turn off without further problems?

If I disable all will the machine still work?

you can turn off anything you want under the "startup" tab, as a example my humble pc has 31 items in this area all but 8 are disable. Some items are hard to guess at what they do... example "dumprept 0-okl" on my machine, I still do not know what it for but I left it off.

The best way to think about this is like a panel in a large building. Some breakers have very strange labels, sometimes the best way to find out what they do is to turn then off and see what happens. ( If the building is occupied at the time our shop refers to this as the "scream test" ...). Others you can tell by there names. Its kind of like that with some programs.

Any other tabs you must be careful on what you remove. Under services I have turn off -uninterruptible power supply ( don't have one),wireless zero config ( I'm all hard wired), x10 device network services ( friend said "hackers like this one on" ) Automatic update ( I hate microsoft patches on patches that cause crashes ) and messenger ( anti spam ).

Sometimes with windows it best to blow it away and reinstall new. I do this about 2 times a year. A neat little trick to this is to install windows on a small drive or a partition of about 20 gig, save any programs you like on some other dive, install all programs on a different drive ( I use "d" and copy all programs and drivers I use on "e" for later quick install.) After I format "C" I install windows and my internet services I then go to windows update and let in install the most up to date files and drivers (I'm safe behind my hardware fire-wall for now ). After that I go to "e" drive and install my fire-wall anti virus programs ( this way they will not react to windows updates). I do not return to windows update for any other patches. Doing this I can finish with a complete windows re-install in a short time, and with no stress.

I hope this helps







[This message has been edited by dfe (edited 06-10-2004).]