"Out of Memory" Problem in Windows XP

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Sloth_Boy

Limp Gawd
Joined
Jun 14, 2005
Messages
131
I have a bit of a problem which has been annoying me for months now. I have 3GB of DDR2 ram installed in my machine, yet when I have a couple of programs open using close to 1.5GB / 2GB, the system starts being weird. I get "Out of Memory" errors in dreamweaver and other apps and I usually can't execute any new programs (and current apps start to behave funny - missing menu's and things).

I use the hibernate feature on my computer a lot, but I doubt that's got anything to do with it. I've done a bit of a google and it seems that there's a reported problem like this but on earlier versions of windows (for system with more than 2GB of ram). I haven't tried taking my two 512mb sticks out, but I may give that a go.

Does anyone have any suggestions. Maybe someone has heard of this before?

Cheers!
 
I've removed the two 512mb sticks and so far, the system is going well. I've got prime 95 drinking over a gb of memory and have photoshop, dreamweaver and premiere pro all open and working. I'll soon put the 512mb sticks back in and see what happens. If it screws up, I'll take out the two 1gb sticks and run the 512mb on their own to see if it's faulty ram or just the operating system no handling the 3Gb of total memory.
 
Yea, I was going to ask if your system was seeing all the RAM as it should be (Task Manager).

Guess you may have figured it out :)
 
Bad memory usually won't give an out of memory error, unless it's really faulty and isn't even recognized. Run memtest with only the 512 MB sticks in and see for sure.
 
Thawaxshop said:
did you turn off your pagefile by chance?
Click to expand...

The thing with XP, that most people don't know... If you disable your pagefile, Windows will re-enable it if needed (it tells you when it does so).
Even if you set it low, XP will increase it if needed.
Nothing you can do about it, unless you go back and disable it again (the next time Windows needs it, it will just enable it again).
So I don't think the pagefile is a problem... Ex. with 3 GB of RAM.

If you took out 1GB of it and it worked, then it does sound like the memory might have some sort of problem with it, however. I would think it would have given you an error though. (Like I said, I would have checked to make sure the system sees all of it).

The latest XP update did address memory issues. You might look into that as well.
 
Thawaxshop said:
did you turn off your pagefile by chance?
Click to expand...

I had tried turning it on and off. Didn't seem to make any difference at the time.

zacdl said:
Yea, I was going to ask if your system was seeing all the RAM as it should be (Task Manager).

Guess you may have figured it out :)
Click to expand...

The system was seeing all the ram, but it started to play up after it had used close to 2GB.

Anyway, I've put the two 512mb sticks back in and it seems to be going alright. I'm running two instances of prime95 as well as photoshop and dreamweaver and it's going fine. No problems and it's pretty quick (considering processor load is close to 100% and I've got only 3mb of free ram left :))

So it seems a simple resiting of the ram may have solved the issue. I'll report back if it hasn't (for the sake of googlers).

Thanks for your input guys.

Just for the sake of it, here's a screenshot of Task Manager :)

3gbog0.png
 
Yea, it sounds like it may not have been seated properly.

Good luck, hopefully it doesn't happen again!

Just curious, did you build this yourself or did Dell build it? Dells are piles of crap to start with, but they normally get things seated. It would be another reason for me to add to my list of why Dells suck ;)

Looks like you might be needing a processor upgrade as well, if that is a fairly common processor utilization.
 
I built it myself in October/November 2004 :) - She's still going strong but I'm planning on buying a new rig (for about $3300 AUD) in about 2 months. I was running two instances of prime95 when that screen was taken, hence the processor utilization and the 4mb of ram available :)

I learnt a thing or two during this experience, one of them is that if you hibernate windows xp, put in more ram and then restore the hibernation, you get a BSOD (well atleast I did).
 
zacdl said:
The thing with XP, that most people don't know... If you disable your pagefile, Windows will re-enable it if needed (it tells you when it does so).
Even if you set it low, XP will increase it if needed.
Nothing you can do about it, unless you go back and disable it again (the next time Windows needs it, it will just enable it again).
So I don't think the pagefile is a problem... Ex. with 3 GB of RAM.

If you took out 1GB of it and it worked, then it does sound like the memory might have some sort of problem with it, however. I would think it would have given you an error though. (Like I said, I would have checked to make sure the system sees all of it).

The latest XP update did address memory issues. You might look into that as well.
Click to expand...

Ive turned it off plenty of times to find out i get a low resources or low memory warning while playing a game, windows didnt turn it on or increase it for me.....
 
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