Out of Memory

[ExSimGuy]

Pal of mine has a fairly new (4 months old) laptop. He's running XP Home with 512 Mb RAM and very few "background" processes. (anti-virus, internet accellerator)

Typical problem occurs when he double clicks an email in Outlook Express and gets a "not enough memory" error message. Then has to re-boot the machine to get it to work.

Not talking about files with attachments, just simple text or HTML (rich text) messages.

Task Manager does not give any immediate signs of problems (though I am not an expert at this, only having come from 98SE a year ago)

Happens with only Outlook Express and essential system services (plus anti-virus etc) running - no apparent memory hogs, and he has plenty of space on the C drive where his virtual memory is located.

Any suggestions better than "taking it back to the shop" (who would then send it to the Acer distributor, and skills here in the "Third World" aren't too great)?

[Saab Dastard]

ESG -
Try the MS website here (http://search.microsoft.com/results.aspx?mkt=en-US&setlang=en-US&q=not+enough+memory+outlook+express).

There's one article in particular that might be relevant: here (http://www.microsoft.com/windows/IE/community/columns/filecorruption.mspx).

Also, make sure that XP is patched to SP2 with all updates and security patches - ditto for IE / Outlook.

It might be worth disabling the AV software (stop the services, set to manual, reboot) to see if the problem persists - if it doesn't it may be AV related. Don't forget to reset the AV service to Auto and start it again!

[Conan the Librarian]

At four months old, I think that after five minutes of faffing, a call to customer services would be in order. Although 512 isn't a lot of RAM, it is quite adequate and should give no problems in day to day operation.


Conan

PS Talk to Acer Direct. They will want the serial number, but you can bypass the shop and get better service. If you wish, PM me and I will find the appropriate details for you.