What does it mean - "not enough free memory"?

Felecha

Golden Member
Sep 24, 2000
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A friend called me up and asked if I knew what's wrong with her computer. 2 year old Compaq Presario, W95, 32mb RAM. Never had a problem before. Bought it as a demo model from a discount place when the line was discontinued.

Recently it started giving her an error message whenever she tried to launch anything -- a program, Windows Explorer, even My Computer. Got a message -- "not enough free memory, try closing some applications." I got her to open Resource Meter, after rebooting, and it said 88%. Sysmon showed 30-something megs of allocated memory. I wondered what to do to help her. This was a phone call, and I ran out of things to think of trying. I had her check and virtual memory was managed by Windows. Where to go from there? All I could thing of was -- if it's complaining, look at what little I know about indicators of resource usage, and that told me nothing. I suggested this might be a time to reinstall Windows, and it turns out someone else had suggested that and she doesn't think she has any disks that came with it when it was bought. She had asked at the store "BJ's Club", kind of like a low-grade Sam's Club. They weren't helpful at all, of course -- "lady, that was 2 years ago. It was a floor demo model. Sorry."

Any clues? I'd like to be able to help, but I don't know anything more here. I do have a W95 CD of my own, ORS2, which I'd never use again. If I gave it to her to install with, would it accept it, or would in need to be reinstalled from the same CD as originally? I hope to be able to help without getting into it too deep. I suppose she could reformat, but that's a can of worms at this point

Thanks

Felecha
 

Budman

Lifer
Oct 9, 1999
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32 megs only???
Geeez with ram prices the way they are now,Just tell her to go buy a 128 meg stick & be done with it.
 

SerraYX

Golden Member
Jan 8, 2001
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Make sure there's not too many programs being loaded upon startup. To check, click Start-->Run.. and type in "msconfig". One of the tabs should say what's being loaded on startup, check off unneccessary things. If that doesn't work, try reinstalling Windows first, then reformatting. One or the other should fix the problem.

"32 megs only???
Geeez with ram prices the way they are now,Just tell her to go buy a 128 meg stick & be done with it. "

That really helps him a lot! Plus if it's 2 years old, that means EDO RAM, which is fairly expensive.
 

dcdomain

Diamond Member
Jan 30, 2000
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SHe might have just recently installed some memory resource hog program, or the disk might be near full capacity, so the virtual memory isn't cutting it anymore. Compaq's are finicky as hell, so becareful about the ram you buy.
 

Felecha

Golden Member
Sep 24, 2000
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well, well. Another friend of hers went over in person and found it was a virus. Apparently has been there for a while and slowly ate up things until nothing was left.
 

Felecha

Golden Member
Sep 24, 2000
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I can't tell you. I called her just now to suggest the ideas from dcdomain, and she said, well this other guy (who I understand knows more than I do -- he used to have a computer shop in town) told her it was a virus. Whatever he told her, I don't know. My conversation with her was brief. She has never had virus protection, although she vaguely thought she did. She said she recognized he name Norton, and thought she had some Norton stuff, but was rather vague about what it all meant. So she was vulnerable. Whatever it was apparently ate up something.
 

Budman

Lifer
Oct 9, 1999
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SerraYX,
2 year old computer has Sdram,3 year old LX chipset used Sdram.

32 is way too little memory,and there's no excuse NOT to get more ram with the prices today.
 

Dan

Diamond Member
Oct 9, 1999
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Win95 doesn't have msconfig but it does have sysedit. For her purposes it will accomplish the same thing.
 

littleprince

Golden Member
Jan 4, 2001
1,339
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81
o man.... i was gonna say, maybe shes just running out of disk space!
u noe, you store your work, and after 2 years, it builds up on a small system like that, and all of a sudden, no disk space for virtual memory

 

Medea

Golden Member
Dec 5, 2000
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I have a 2 and a half year old "war horse" at the office which is a Win95 machine - and keeps on running just like the Energizer bunny. :D

I don't know what kind of virus would leave her with little memory, but about a year ago, I began getting the same error messages. It sounds like she has a setup like mine [Pentium 333] where her hard drive is partitioned to a C, D, E, etc. drive - with each drive set to @2.3 gigs (WIN95's limit). What's probably happened is that she installed too many programs to Drive C, which Windows uses as the swap drive, and she's now running out of "memory" because the C drive has very little free space. If that's her setup, she needs to uninstall some programs and reinstall them on one of the other drives.

BTW, mine is a Dell, came w/64 megs of ram and uses PC100 ram. I threw another stick in it recently and would advise that she definitely should get more ram.