Not enough memory on my computer!

[Autumn]

I am in the process of typing a newsletter and had copied a clipart from another document in order to paste it, when I got this message. See screengrab.

Now I have 445 Gb free on my C drive and 232 Gb free on my external hard drive.

The clipart was from the Word program and would only be tiny.

Can anyone explain to me why I have this message saying there is not enough memory on my computer?

Do I need to allocate it from somewhere?

As you can see at the bottom of the screengrab, I haven't many programs open.

[paul.r.w]

Re: Not enough memory on my computer!

This is nothing to done with storage space on your hard drives, this is the computers memory i.e. its RAM. This can happen if you are running several programs at once or using large amounts of clip art with several windows open.

Can also happen after being on the computer for a while using different programs and the memory gets fragmented. Save your work and reboot.

Also check for any virus and spyware activity.

[Autumn]

Re: Not enough memory on my computer!

I have 2 Gb RAM.

I have Windows Live Messenger, The document on which I am working, another similar one of 384 Kb and Lightroom open.

I am never really sure whether Lightroom counts, as I thought it just copied the information from the photographs, but not the full files, so I don't know where to look for how much memory Lightroom is taking.

I am sure that I have previously had many more programs open.

So ... ... I am still puzzled and wonder if I should be doing anything to release more RAM wherever it is needed.

[JSR]

Re: Not enough memory on my computer!

Is everything up-to-date on your computer? (Drivers, software, etc?)

A Google revealed that someone else had a "not enough memory" issue when pasting into Works - they were pasting text, not even an image. Their problem was caused by Toshiba's HotKey utility having memory problems (presumably a memory leak). Toshiba issued a patch to fix it.

I don't know if that's anything to do with your computer but maybe you've got memory leak issues as well that have nothing to do with physical memory, hard disk space, number of programmes open, or anything to do with Works.

You could try using other software for your document (Open Office is free - and it'll probably give you many more useful features than Works' rather basic Word Processor) and see if that helps to avoid the issue.

[rogleale]

Re: Not enough memory on my computer!

Hi Autumn,

I hope that I am not insulting your intelligence with this!

How to find out if your machine is really short of RAM. (I think you mean 445 MB not GB!)

Right click on the toolbar, select Task Manager, and click on the 'Performance' tab.
On the left hand side you will see a bar graph of the memory being used.
Reduce the Task Manager to a toolbar icon but leave it open.

Try to reproduce the memory warning you had before, and if it appears, double click on the TM icon, which will open up and reveal the RAM usage.

These warnings are usually caused by other than RAM shortage.

Roger

[Autumn]

Re: Not enough memory on my computer!

Hi Autumn,

I hope that I am not insulting your intelligence with this!

How to find out if your machine is really short of RAM. (I think you mean 445 MB not GB!)

Right click on the toolbar, select Task Manager, and click on the 'Performance' tab.
On the left hand side you will see a bar graph of the memory being used.
Reduce the Task Manager to a toolbar icon but leave it open.

Try to reproduce the memory warning you had before, and if it appears, double click on the TM icon, which will open up and reveal the RAM usage.

These warnings are usually caused by other than RAM shortage.

Roger

I did mean GB, but 445 was the total on "C" drive - I actually have 334GB Free. I was talking hard drive, not RAM.

When I got the message about not enough memory, I didn't realise it meant RAM, but even so, I still thought I had ample as I have 2 GB (before using any).

Thank you for giving me all that info re Task Manager, I have been looking at that recently and wondering if there was a tutorial on it.

My question for today was to have been "How can I tell how much RAM is in use? " You have answered my question before I have asked it!

Got to fly now, but will check it out later.

Thanks again.

[JSR]

Re: Not enough memory on my computer!

I don't think it's a RAM issue per se. If you have 2GB of physical RAM and loads of disk space, you'll have a swap file that's probably 2-4GB big. I can't see there being an issue there unless the swap file's been turned off. Some software insists on using the swap file even if you have enough physical RAM that you want to turn it off for increased speed.

This is probably completely going down the wrong path, but what version of Windows do you use?

I know in the old days that certain versions of Windows had issues if you gave them too much memory. I think Windows 98 maxed out at 768MB and Windows ME was 1GB (from my own aging memory, I could be wrong).

If you gave them any more than that, you'd actually be worse off. If Windows 98 was given more than 1GB of memory, it'd need more than that amount of memory to address that amount of memory (sounds daft, I know). The way I visualised it was that Windows splits the memory into a number of "pigeon holes". The more memory it has, the more pigeon holes it has, and the more memory it needs to keep track of those pigeon holes. You reach a stage when there isn't enough memory to keep track of the number of pigeon holes. The result would be that, even if you had no apps open, it could complain of lack of memory! Even if you gave it more memory, it'd complain of lack of memory (only quicker and more frequently). Keeping it to 768MB or below was the only way to avoid it.

I suspect that neither Windows XP or Vista has that problem (but just because I've not heard of it doesn't mean it doesn't!).

[rogleale]

Re: Not enough memory on my computer!

Hi again,

I think you may have found a clip-art with an error in the coding Audrey. If the clip-art has an error which will prevent it being opened as html you will get that error message. If you have a bit of html knowledge you could click View>Page Source and look for the error, but it isn't easy!
Just a thought, but what is the file type of the clip-art? (Rt click and view 'Properties'), it would normally be .gif or jpeg but if you got it from a Word document it may have .doc, and you could try changing it.

Roger

[Autumn]

Re: Not enough memory on my computer!

First let me thank all of you for your input.

I am beginning to wonder if it is my fault!

I was typing a newsletter. I usually open the last one I have typed and rename it with the date, delete all unwanted text and just fill in the new information.

I probably did start some years ago by using Microsoft Works, but now I do have Microsoft Office 2003, so in future, I could open my documents in Microsoft Office Word.

On this occasion, I wanted to use a clipart from the previous newsletter and I copied it from this previous newsletter and it was when I tried to paste it into the current newsletter that I got this message.

All the documents are held on my external harddrive. Many of them were typed on my old computer which had the OS XP Home Edition, whilst my current computer OS is Vista.

I suspect if I had just imported the clipart directly from "Insert", I may not have had this problem.

Things seem to be OK now, so I am not going to worry about it.

Next time I will open the document in MS Office Word and import any clipart directly from the program and not copy and paste it from an old saved document, and hope that this does the trick.

I am very grateful for all your tips and information. Thanks to you all again.