Out of memory errors in Win98 FE

[nightowl]

On my dad's computer at work he keeps getting "Out of Memory" errors on Windows 98 FE. During the most recent instance of of the error he was running Word, Excel, Lotus Notes, and a couple mainframe file transfer applications. He has a 128MB of ram now and he has pleanty of free hard drive space. All the support center center says is to reboot and go from there. He thinks that going to 256MB will fix his problems, but I have my doubts about that because I can run a similar amount of programs on an older PC with 64mb ram and I have never seen the message there. So, here are my 2 current solutions reinstall Win98 or move to NT/2000. NT is the current standard but some how he got stuck with 98. Does anyone know of anything else?

 

[WhiteMouse]

Is swap option on?

 

[nightowl]

The last time I checked the swap file was on. That is why I said there was enough free drive space on Drive C.

 

[nightowl]

bump

 

[MrChicken]

In my experience the "out of memory" msg generated by Windows 9x is due to a corruption of the kernel memory, not physical(ram) or virtual(disk) memory. IOW, it's a program that has hosed the kernel memory space.
Usually it would be a 16 bit program that does it, since every 32 bit program gets it's memory space, but 16 bit programs all use the same one.
The other things I have seen cause this are Word problems, mostly a corrupted normal.dot file (usually infected by a macro virus), and a bad macro in word. You can try deleting normal.dot and restarting Word to create a new normal.dot. Beware that if it corrupted or infected, you'll probably have some wrod docs carrying the problem and will in turn corrupt normal.dot again. You can try making normal.dot read only, but the newer viruses just blow by that.