What's wrong with my computer?

[LightHearted]

Can someone help me? Something weird is going on with my computer.

Several times a day, Internet Exporer stops working. I close the window, then try to reopen it, and I get a warning saying that I don't have enough memory to run the program.

This goes away when I restart my computer, but it continues to happen throughout the day.

I run IE 6 on my computer, and I just updated Windows last week.

 

[rdale]

Can someone help me? Something weird is going on with my computer.

Several times a day, Internet Exporer stops working. I close the window, then try to reopen it, and I get a warning saying that I don't have enough memory to run the program.

This goes away when I restart my computer, but it continues to happen throughout the day.

I run IE 6 on my computer, and I just updated Windows last week.

Hi LightHearted, You may want to give RAMBooster a shot at fixing your memory leaks. It's here :
sci.fi/~borg/rambooster/

It's also here at download dotcom :
download.com.com/3000-2086-1400043.html?tag=lst-0-2

I've used the free program for years, really helps if you're using W98...

hope it helps

 

[WeakButHopeful]

In order to provide help additional information about your system would probably be needed. For instance, what operating system are you running (WinXP, WinME, Win2K, Win98, etc?), how much memory do you have installed (128 meg, 256meg, 512 meg?)
Also the exact wording of the message you're getting.

I know this sounds like a bureaucratic response, but at this point I can think of four different possibilities, and the above information would help narrow things down:
1) actually not having enough memory (as you say, you just updated Windows last week, and if you were borderline before this could have pushed it over the limit)
2) a bogus message being put up by a virus
3) a large number of spybots running of which you are unaware, each consuming some of your resources (have you run Spybot Search & Destroy and/or Adaware? Have you heard of those programs?)
4) hardware problems (I list last because it's unlikely but possible)

 

[marduke]

yeah what weakbuthopeful said. more info on your system please.

 

[trunks2k]

Yeah, a bit more information on your system is needed. Most specifically, the amount of RAM your computer has what operating system you are now using. It would also be nice to have a list of the running proccesses which you can get by right clicking on the taskbar and going to "task manager" then clicking on the processes tab. A list of the names of the processes and their memory usage is helpful.

On the surface of it all it seems to me that you updated your system from an old version of windows, i.e. windows 98 to something recent and memory intensive like windows 2000, without taking into account your memory requirements. Most computers running Windows 98 tend to have lower amounts of memory, so upgrading to Windows 2000 will use up almost all of the system's available memory. In the meantime, you can try a few things, clear out temporary files and increase the virtual memory.

 

[rdale]

Dittos all above, WeakButHopeful gave you a great list to get you going. If in the future, you need some more free tools to help when you're Snooping Around

 

[Kung]

There's a few things you can do, short-term, to help out.

1) Delete any trash files on your computer. Go to 'Start' and then 'Search' and do a search, using the following line:

*.tmp, *.~mp, *._mp, *.old, *.bak

Delete any and all files/folders that it finds.

2) Ensure that the amount of your virtual memory is right around 2 times the amount of your RAM. For instance, if you have 256Mb of memory in your PC, make the virtual memory 512Mb.

3) Check to see what background processes are running.

4) If you're running Windows 98 or Windows XP, go to 'Start' and then 'Run' and type 'msconfig' to see what starts up when your computer starts up. Some programs start up and then continue to run, hogging valuable RAM.

 

[praying]

Can someone help me? Something weird is going on with my computer.

Several times a day, Internet Exporer stops working. I close the window, then try to reopen it, and I get a warning saying that I don't have enough memory to run the program.

This goes away when I restart my computer, but it continues to happen throughout the day.

I run IE 6 on my computer, and I just updated Windows last week.

Gremlins

Edited to add, that is the equivalent of my saying I don't know.

 

[hrodas]

what computer do you have?

 

[Word of Peace]

What version of Windows do you have? How much RAM do you have? You can find out these things by right-clicking on My Computer and clicking properties, or by double-clicking on the System icon in the Control Panel.(1)

If you have Windows 95, 98 or ME, then your problem is undoubtedly going to be due to system resources. (2) There's not much you can do to make it better. Have the Resource Monitor utility (3) run each startup and watch the little green meter in the system tray. If it goes into the yellow, close some applications and/or restart the computer. If this becomes too much of a problem, consider upgrading to XP.

(1) System properties dialog:

(2) Windows 95, 98 and ME have a very small amount of memory set aside for system resources, like windows, images, and drawing resources ("pens", "brushes", fonts, etc). THis memory is a fixed size, and can't get any bigger no matter how much RAM you have. Applications use this shared resource memory when they need it, and they don't always return it when they're done with it. When the resources are low, new applications can't be started because they don't have the resources they need. Eventually this memory gets used up to a point where the system itself doesn't have the resources it needs, and it acts strange or crashes.

(3) It's an optional component so you may have to install it using Add/Remove Programs in the Control Panel.

 

[trunks2k]

If you have Windows 95, 98 or ME, then your problem is undoubtedly going to be due to system resources. (2) There's not much you can do to make it better. Have the Resource Monitor utility (3) run each startup and watch the little green meter in the system tray. If it goes into the yellow, close some applications and/or restart the computer. If this becomes too much of a problem, consider upgrading to XP.

Um, I think you have that wrong. If someone is having resource problems, upgrading is NOT going to help, especially in terms of RAM. Windows XP uses considerably more memory and more processing power than 95/98/Me/NT does. IIRC, XP needs 128MB RAM just to run. 98 needs much much less than that.

 

[Word of Peace]

Um, I think you have that wrong. If someone is having resource problems, upgrading is NOT going to help, especially in terms of RAM.

We're not talking about available memory (RAM) here. We're talking about system resources, which can run out long before your RAM is used up. I'll highlight some pertinent parts of what I said:

(2) Windows 95, 98 and ME have a very small amount of memory set aside for system resources, like windows, images, and drawing resources ("pens", "brushes", fonts, etc). This memory is a fixed size, and can't get any bigger no matter how much RAM you have. Applications use this shared resource memory when they need it, and they don't always return it when they're done with it. When the resources are low, new applications can't be started because they don't have the resources they need. Eventually this memory gets used up to a point where the system itself doesn't have the resources it needs, and it acts strange or crashes.

Windows 2000 and XP no longer have this problem, because they are built on a different kernel (core) that allows the system resource memory pool to grow as large as the available RAM permits. However, as you said, they require more RAM to run (128MB vs 32 for Win98 and 64 for WinME). I'm not advocating everyone upgrading - but they should upgrade if they find it annoying enough and frequent enough to warrant spending their money to fix it.

For more details on the Win9x/ME memory problem, see this article.

 

[HisEagle]

I have to agree with much of what the others have told you. We really need more information about your system and it's OS, as well as the amount of RAM you have, and any programs/processes running in the background. I WILL tell you this - Windows XP is a memory hog, and if you are trying to run it on anything less than 256M of RAM, you are going to seriously bog down your system. Preferably, at the very minimum, you should have at least 512M of RAM. RAM is pretty cheap these days, so it would be wise to add as much as you can.

Try running a complete virus scan, and Ad-Aware. It also wouldn't hurt to defrag your hard drive, though that likely isn't the problem.

 

[Word of Peace]

A couple other things:

• Have you installed anything extra that plugs into IE recently (toolbars, browser helpers, etc)? If so, maybe one of those plugins is leaking resources.
• How much do you typically have running before the problem occurs and when it occurs? This includes things that you don't normally notice, like system tray apps. If you only run what you really need to have running, you'll have more memory for what you need to run.

 

[Stryper]

macintosh sounds so good right now...