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Insufficient Memory Errors

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Hi. I have a user who uses Word probably more than any other human alive today – she writes documents and letters for our CEO, President and our Vice President.

She uses a Dell PC with a 600 mhz Celeron CPU and it came with a standard 64mb of RAM but I upgraded her to 128mb of RAM a wee bit more than a month ago.

She is plagued with “Insufficient Memory” Errors. At least 2 – 3 times per week on average, mostly during her use of MS Word ’97 (which, if you wonder has been patched to SR-2).

The catch is we’ve re-installed the whole Office 97 suite of programs already, I checked her page file – its fine and system resources never drops below 80%.

Anything else I should check? Or better yet – if you know exactly how to solve thisdilemma it’d be appreciated.

Thanks.

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Insufficient Memory Errors

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I have heard about similar problems with Office products. a solution is to delete the normal.dot file(s). These are only template files and will be recreated upon entering the appl. Sometimes it might be necessary to also reload the suite/program.Hope this helps.

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How about disk space? I’ve heard this can be a problem if there’s insufficient free space on disk, say less than 2-3 meg.

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Check your Hard Drive. Windows uses quite a bit of hard drive for the swap disk. If the swap disk is too small the your performance drops and you can get other errors.

I would try to keep at least 70% of physical memory free on the hard drive. (150% is even better!) You have 128MB of ram then try to keep at least 90MB free on the hard drive.

Also check what other programs are running at the same time.

Use the resource monitor that comes with Windows to get a better look at what’s happening when these errors pop up.

What level is the error? Does it pop up a regular windows type dialog that has a button for details, or a big ugly white box with two buttons, or is it a blue screen?

You said the problem MOSTLY occurs when she’s in office. What other tasks blow-up?

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Are you SURE your paging file on your hard drive is O.K.?

If you have 128 MB of Memory, your paging swap file must be AT LEAST that large or greater.

In case of a Crash, which will cause a Blue screen death Memory Dump, your swap file(Pageing file), must be equal to or better yet larger than your physical memory.

Likewise, Office programs use a “Content Catalog”, which will periodically update itself. This uses approximately 50% of your CPU resource during that long (up to 2 hours) update mode. This time is greatly reduced if you have a very large swap file.

Cheers
DS9

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I believe that Office97 cones with (as does Office2000) a macro template “Support8.dot”. The one for O2K is “Support9.dot”. Using this will greatly enhance your Office usage. Use the menu path of File-Open and look for the file under the “macros” subfolder of Office Directory of installation. Open this and follow the directions. I have found that by increasing a couple of the memory settings for Word have helped a lot.

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I have something for you to check.
The *.dic file. Compare it to others.
This dictionary file is loaded into memory and pushes other stuff out of the way. If she uses Word as much as you say, there are probably a lot of additions to this file and most people expect that it can take whatever they want to put into it. This is not unreasonable, but the software does have limitations which can lead to this very error.

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An efficient spell checker would be used on a finished document, but this software loads the whole thing into available memory to check spelling on the fly.

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