Lately I’ve been getting the message “There is not enough free memory to run this program…” and it’s really annoying. My computer is an Athlon 1400 MHz with 512mb ram running Windows ME. It’s not like I have 50 programs running at once, all I have running most of the times is Aol instant messager, Norton Anti-virus, Kazaa and Windows programs (Systray, Explorer, etc.).
Anyway, I go to play a game and I don’t have enough memory. So I go to System Properties ----> Performance and it says there “System Resources: 50%” which doesn’t seem that low to me. I mean 50% of 512 is 256Mb which is still plenty. So what’s the story? Why is my computer running out of memory? Sometimes I don’t have enough to play solitare.
Check on what is loading when the computer starts up. Slowdowns of the type you mention are often due to lack of disk space or lots of spyware applets and non-necessary applets tagging along and grabbing resources at startup.
Use the system information’s applet’s system configuration utility under the startup tab to de-activate non-critical startup applets.
I’m going off of memeory here (And a weak one at that right now), so the numbers could be way off, but isn’t there an issue with RAM above 256 in ME?
If I’m remembering my stuff correctly, ME (Acually the whole 9x line) doesn’t utilize RAM above 256.
Now it’s either 256 or 512, I don’t know, but I do know that when I added RAM to my system, and brought it up to 768, Windows 98 started acting really goofy.
If that’s not it, the only other thing that pops out to me (Not an expert in the least) is that Kazaa program. That thing’s a hog and should only be used and/or open when acquiring files (MHO).
Shut that bad-boy down and also check you’re background apps ala astro’s suggestion.
Also bear in mind “system resources” is not a linear reflection of the existing RAM . I don’t have time or a handy reference to cite how “system resources” are typically allocated in memory but IIRC RAM above 128 megs (possibly lower) doesn’t figure prominently into “system resources” calculations in terms of how a windows 98/ME OS l based system uses resources at bootup.
I too have read that RAM above 256 in 9x and ME isn’t really utilized well.
Also, “system resources” can apply to virtual memory too I believe. So, if you have your swap file set to let windows handle it (which it does a piss poor job of), and your available HD space is getting low, your swap file will be small too.
Biggest reccomendation I can make is to get rid of ME 
Either go back to 98 SE or move up to 2000 or XP. Personally I am back at 98se…I don’t like my operating system eating up more resources than nessessary
I have just zonked up the performance of my nasty work pc with a shareware utility cacheman I found on http://www.downloads.com
I have to agree with this as well. I had ME on my laptop (came with the vaio) and I ran it for a month or two. It just fell apart. Started acting really funny, crashing all the time. I formatted the drive and put 98se on it and it ran perfect for months and months… until I got rid of that laptop.
And I think I recall the memory as being 512 and above. I forget the issue though. I’ve got 700 plus in my win98 machine and it works just fine.
Oh yeah. and another thing you might want to check is installed fonts. Dump the ones you aren’t using.
ME’s RAM issues start at 512MB.
See:
http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;Q253912
I don’t know if WinME has this, but WinXP and Win2000 do. Open up Task Manager (right click on the taskbar, Task Manager). Go to “Processes” and check up on “Mem Usage”. You can see what’s going on with the memory here. You could also check on the processor under “CPU”.
nope- that’s only w/ 2k and XP
“Windows system resources” and “System graphical resources” (or something like that) have nothing directly to do with physical RAM. Win 9X has some arbitrary amount of memory you can dedicate to open programs as far as displaying them, etc, and so you can get memory errors long, long before you actually run out of physical ram. One of the big reasons I switched to win2k.
As astro pointed out earlier, RAM isn’t an issue in resolving this guys problem.
I sped right past that fact when initially responding to this thread. I basically had a ‘DOH!’ moment as soon as I saw astro’s post.
Oh well.
And it’s a 512 issue, not 256.
Correction made there too.
Junchbailey, forget what I wrote in my earlier post. Listen to everyone else- dump you’re start-up programs and if you can, dump ME too.
Junch?
Everyone is saying to get rid of WinME but would I be better of going back to 98 or upgrading to XP?
I’d go to www.jv16.org and pick up RegCleaner-
With it you can take out all the junk that I can almost guarantee you have running in the background @ startup.
let me guess- there are like 7-10 little icons in your lower righthand corner? realplayer. shite like that.
Run Reg Cleaner, and click on the startup and start taking out that junk. (it has a backup/restore for you in case you remove something you shouldn’t.) Just start going through em 1 at a time, rebooting in between each time to make sure you didn’t remove something you need.
that might help, but I am really gonna have to echo the call for ditching ME. I think that you’d be happier. yeah, 98 is older- I wouldn’t necessarily go back. With your system you should be on XP or at least windows 2000. Yeah, its more money to spend. ME should be fine, yada yada, but its not. 2k and XP are completely different than 98/Me which were still really just old clunky, inefficient MSDOS at the core. 2K/XP are based on NT- way better at memory management, etc.
I prefer to buy a system maintenance program. These work perfectly well for me. For example, my registry gets about 10% fragmented each week. Thats the registry & I use System Suite 2000 to defrag the registry & do a whole other lot of stuff. it restarts the computer to defrag the registry.
Well, for one thing, doesnt KaaZa run a sh*tload of spyware programs ???
I found an excellent site for computer maintenance. It is located here.
Most non-engineers would be well advised to bookmark that link.