Windows "Out of Memory" errors

[EricNoah]

I'm going to try to help a friend with some "out of memory" errors that crop up when loading Microsoft Word under WinME. I thought before I head over I would see if anyone had any thoughts about where I might start. My ideas...

1) Virus: she claims she's run virus scan with recent definitions, but I'll double-check.

2) Adware/spyware/some other software running in the background. I'll check msconfig to see what is loading on startup. Will use AdAware to try to delete ad/spyware. The user has older children who install software without her knowledge or consent, including no-nos like Kazaa, so I'll be looking into that as well.

3) Something wrong with the Word "normal.dot" template -- I'll look at that to see if it's been changed recently, and may try deleting that and see what happens.

4) Suppose I could re-install Word if there are disks around for that.

Any other ideas are welcome!

 

[drothgery]

It's a long shot, but her hard drive might be full.

No disk space would mean no swap file space which would mean virtual memory is equal to physical memory, which could be a problem if she's got less than 128 MB of RAM or so.

 

[EricNoah]

Thanks, I'll check that.

Eric

 

[RangerWickett]

I've got a 'dinky' 6 gig hard drive, and a few weeks ago I got down to 40MB of free hard drive space, due to me not limiting the cache size for Internet Explorer. I had several months of random junk clogging up nearly a gig. And with only 40 MB of free space, it took a while to delete them all. *grin*

Good luck.

 

[Joshua Randall]

My mom's new computer was shipped with the hard drive nearly entirely full of weird backup files. You can bet I reamed out the customer service rep for that. Not that he was at fault, but you know what they say about sh*t flowing downhill.

This may be too obvious, but see if she is running a gazillion TSR(1) applications -- the crap that shows up in your system tray. Those can suck up memory.

(1) That's Terminate and Stay Resident, not the company that used to make D&D.

 

[Silveras]

If it happens only with Word, and not Excel (for example), then the odds are good there is a corrupted file among those that make up Word, and re-installing is your best bet at that point.

However, you may need to uninstall first, because if any updates have been applied (and if those are the corrupted files), the installer will leave the newer files in place.

If it happens with Word and Excel and other "Office Suite" applications, but not other applications, it may be a shared file that is corrupted. In that case, again, you may need to do a complete uninstall and reinstall.

Sometimes, it is the document that is corrupted. If your friend is starting Word by trying to open the same document all the time, the document may be at fault.

Good luck.

 

[EricNoah]

Went over this morning, deleted normal.dot, and voila, problem solved. Also deleted Kazaa and some other junk. Thanks for all of the suggestions.

 

[herald]

Went over this morning, deleted normal.dot, and voila, problem solved. Also deleted Kazaa and some other junk. Thanks for all of the suggestions.

I work with a a IT department in a fortune 500 company that depends on many versions of Word. One thing is consistant with Word across all windows platforms; the Normal.dot file gets corrupted often. Deleting the normal.dot was a good move.