On 2 Sep 99, at 21:24, Rick P wrote:

> Oh, those dreaded words.......

  A memory leak is a specific kind of software bug.  This *could* be in a
driver, but until recently I was making daily use of a pretty similar machine
without this problem, so that's unlikely.

> Yes, you've heard from me before on this subject.  I wish I could fix it.
> I had 64M on a FIC 503+ MB, 7G HD (4G still free 3 of it on C:\), Matrox
> G200 8M AGP,  AMD K6-2 300 MHz.
>
> OS= Win 98 upgrade, clean install (long ago)
> I run Netscape 4.6, also use it for mail
> run quicken, excel, word, notepad, Norton AV

  Min was 503+, 2x 8GB HDs, G200 Millenium AGP 8MB, AMD K6-2 300.  Win98 SE
clean install, MS Office 97 and Norton.

> I also run Active Worlds 3D browser, Virtual Places form Excite and ICQ.

  I had not been using quicken, active worlds, virtual places, or ICQ.  If the
problem is actually a memory leak (see below), odds are that it's in one or
more of these (and that this question might be better answered on PCSOFT...).

> I was told 64M may not be enough, so I upgraded to 128M  (all Corsair
> PC100).

  I did have 256MB of RAM installed....

> I'm still having problems.  I thought it was due to Active Worlds or VP,
> but I haven't run them in a while to try to figure this out.

  That narrows the suspect list a bit....


> I just rebooted, ran quicken, netscape (just to get mail) and left the
> system on all night (monitor off).  Next day I copy a CD to the HD and
> after that I can't open my next program because there isn't enough
> memory!!!  I couldn't even get the Start button to bring up the close
> screen.  This happens way too often.

  Okay, clicking the Start button doesn't bring up the close screen.  What
leads you to believe that this is a memory leak problem?

[1] Try running Resource Monitor, and bringing it up when the problem is
encountered.  Resources can be leaked even more easily than memory, and
adding RAM won't help.  Resources before and after can help track down the
culprit if this is the problem.

[2] Are you running out of swap file space?

[3] System Monitor can track various metrics associated with the Memory
Manager.  Consider "Unused Physical Memory" and "Swapfile in Use", and see
how these look when the problem manifests -- might be useful to explore some
of the others as well.


David G

                Curious about the people moderating your
                   messages? Visit our staff web site:
                     http://nospin.com/pc/staff.html