On 7 Feb 2002, at 13:51, Irena Thomas wrote:

> Hello Group;
>
> System: P4, 20Gb HD (18Gb free), 256Mb RAM, Windows ME Edition (OEM).
>
> Problem: frequent "our of resources", "low on resources" and "not enough
> memory to run this program. Quit one or more applicationas and try again".
>
<snip>
>
> Questions:
>  1. Should we uncheck everything but SystemTray ?

  Could be worth a try.

>  2. Is it windows or hardware problem ?

  It's software, better than 98% odds.

  "Resources" are read-only data items such as font and menu
definitions.
  In 95/98/98SE -- and probably ME, since that's descended from the
same parentage -- each resource has only a 16-bit identifier.  In
theory, this would allow for 65,536 (64K) different resources to be
loaded at once.  But for performance reasons, the identifier gets
used as a memory offset instead of an index, so the total *space* for
resources is only 64K.  Well, 256K -- it was a single 64K area in
Windows 3.x, but in 95 Microsoft broke out different kinds of
resources into four different 64K memory areas.
  Unfortunately, you can run out of memory in one area if you have
too many of one kind of resource, even if there is plenty of space in
other areas....

  (This does suggest something you could check -- How many fonts do
you have loaded?  If it's 1000 or more, that could be the
problem....)

  This 16-bit resource handling has another problem, too -- resources
can be shared between programs, with no tracking of who is using a
given resource.  It's terribly easy for a program to load a resource,
and terminate without ever telling the OS "I don't need that resource
any more", leaving it orphanned in precious memory taking up space
that will not be freed until a reboot.

  NT/2000/XP treat resources entirely differently, and so avoid this
whole issue.  If all of your hardware and applications are supported,
you might consider XP Home as an alternative to 98SE.

>  3. Should we uinstall ME and get Win98SE instead ?

  Maybe.  98SE's resource handling is not great, but is well
understood.  ME seems to be used by relatively few people, many of
whom are not happy.  I don't know specifics of ME's resource
handling, but it doesn't sound like 98SE would/could be much worse.

Dave Gillett

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