At work I spend most of my time in front of a computer working with GibbsCAM, AutoCAD and SolidWorks. The programs I use are pretty outdated and my old computer really had no problem running them. I recently got a slick computer upgrade (8 G RAM, Radeon HD 5750, 3.2 GHz processor) and now my older graphics programs are twitchy and sometimes crash. I didn’t record the exact message but the gist of it was I was out of memory.
There is just no way this is possible, so what settings should I change and how can I do it? Now, as in the past, we run on Vista.
The programs you call “outdated” are surely 32-bit executables. Even on a computer with 8 gigabytes, they are executed in a 32-bit “box” which restricts them to about 4 gigabytes of memory, and usually much less.
It’s also likely that the new computer has a multicore processor. Some older programs don’t properly handle thread concurrency with modern processors, and this can eventually lead to memory corruption, which in turn leads to errors about inability to allocate memory. If you can’t get a newer version of the software, you could try the following: open your troublesome program, open Task Manager, go to the Processes page, find your program in the list, right-click on it and choose Set Affinity. In the box, select only one logical processor and click OK. See if this stabilizes your program somehow. (Note that you would have to do this every time you open the program.)