Out Of Memory - Help Needed

[Guest Elton]

Originally posted by ALAN FAWCETT:

I may be able to do you a favour soon

 

That's what I tell the sheep!

 

 

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Elton Murphy

North East Sea Angling

[Guest Newt]

You have had some good suggestions for cleaning up storage (the hard disk) but memory errors usually have a different cause.

 

Three major possibilities (and some other obscure things I won't mention until we rule out these).

1. You may have had a physical memory chip go bad. They sometimes have a very small flaw from the mfg. process and the shrink/expand cycle as they heat and cool may have made a section become unusable. to check for this, open a dos window and run the command mem /c /p (space before each /). You are interested mainly in the totals toward the end of the listing. See if they match what you physically have in the PC. If not, you probably got a bad module and need to replace it. If everything looks ok then

 

2) You may have a too-small or missing page file. Windoze uses the page file to handle programs that won't fit in memory and are running but not active at the moment. The operating system takes care of moving stuff from physical memory to virtual memory (the page file). To check, go into control panel~system~performance. If you have 95, there should be an advanced button or some such; 98 has a tab labeled Virtual Memory. The default is to let the OS handle it and this option should be checked. There is also an option to disable it which YOU SHOULD NOT DO. My preference (and you can make the change while you are looking at it) is to set the same minimum and maximum size for the page file and to set it at triple your physical memory (or 480 Mb in your case) or higher if you run lots of programs at the same time. Only drawback is that space you allocate for the page file is not available for any other purpose so it does take up a bit of hard disk space.

 

3) Too hot inside the computer. Causes some strange problems. Usually happens if a fan fails or filters become clogged. Easiest way to check is to remove the case (if a desktop) and run it for a while. If no memory errors, you got a bad fan or dirty filter. While you have the case off and the PC running, check the little fan over the cpu and any other internal fans you can see. If it has stopped, you will have all kinds of problems. New fan usually fixes all.

 

4) You may have a program with a "memory leak" which means it allocates memory to itself and never releases it but takes more as needed. The longer one of these critters is running, the less memory you have. I'd tend to suspect any new programs you have loaded. Diagnosing this problem is not simple so you pretty much want to rule out everything else first.

 

As a side note - laptops are more prone to trash memory than desktops due to heat problems. No good way to get rid of it. I have a son who does lighting design for stage productions. He uses a couple of CAD programs that are memory intensive and video intensive. He has trashed 3 laptops in the past year - memory failures from excess heat in each case.

[Guest davidP]

Elton

I used to get that sort of problems with myprevious machine and never got to the bottom of it. On my new machine however I bought and installed a copy of Norton Systemworks which includes a load of tools that perform all sorts of health, performance and maintenance checks. I've had none of the same problems with this machine and it's running more or less the same software as the previous one. I can't say definatively that Systemworks is why thereare no problems, but it certainly seems to help.

 

Another thing you could look at is a little tool called Rambooster. I've heard it mentioned in several places and always with positive feedback. I haven't had chance to have a play with it yet but it looks interesting :

http://www.sci.fi/~borg/rambooster/index.htm

[Guest Elton]

Cheers, guys. I'm trying a combination of the above and now have Rambooster running.

 

I have a lot of programmes that seem to have taken it upon themselves to set themselves up in the panel at the bottom right of the screen. They're not in 'start up', so where's the setting to remove them? I don't use half of them and I'm sure that they must be eating memory.

 

All the best,

 

Elton

 

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Elton Murphy

North East Sea Angling

[Guest gray-catchpole]

it does sound like a faulty chip, or mem sepage.

 

but if you have lots of programs starting and cant find them to turn them off, i havnt seen this mentioned so try this:

 

go to start>programs>accessories>system tools>system information

 

this will open a new window called "microsoft system information"

 

go to tools>system configuration utility

 

from there you will have lots of tabs and one is called start up, you can choose the programs you wish to enable/disable from here

 

ps you can turn off config sys and autoexec.bat this will do no harm and may speed up your booting times.

 

BTW. nice one newt, you really know your stuff

 

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gray-catchpole

 

 

 

http://catchpole.cjb.net

mailto:catchpole@go-fishing.co.ukcatchpole@go-fishing.co.uk

[Guest Newt]

Thanks Gray. You and Liam ain't too shabby either. (that's a good thing in case the expression didn't translate).