Win98 Question

[JLB Please excuse me, I'm a Dick. Not a moron just a Dick Find all posts View Profile Close JLB]

I know I am going to feel like PC talking to Mac in those TV commercials.

I've been feeling pretty proud of myself, limping along doing my normal daily computer stuff without many problems. Then today I got an error message I have never seen before.

I had AOL open, and IE, and wanted to copy and paste something from the site I was on to my word processor. When I clicked to open Works I got a message that said I did not have enough available memory to open that program, that I would have to quit something else first. I have never seen that before.

But it opened it anyway, let me copy and paste and print, and that was followed shortly by lock-up. I shut down manually, which has become commonplace, rebooted, and here I am.

Any idea what's up?

[Fern Senior Member Find all posts View Profile Close Fern]

I'd bet your computer has "oldtimers disease." You know, a memory problem.
I say that cause its

[bigfrank Administrator Find all posts View Profile Close bigfrank]

I get that all the time running windows XP pro. I have a ton of windows and tabs open and at times the computer will freeze and close some pages on me.

[JLB Please excuse me, I'm a Dick. Not a moron just a Dick Find all posts View Profile Close JLB]

I try not to open too many browsers, because it really freaks when it has too many plates spinning.

That is why I was surprised that this happened with only aol and IE open, plus all the other crap running in the background. But it is alway running, huh, and this never happened before.

Lockup yes, but this error message no.

[gophish Super Moderator Find all posts View Profile Close gophish]

Jim,
I think what you are experiencing is what is know as a "memory leak". It's not really a leak but what happens in the OS is that various processes run at various times to accomplish what ever you are trying to do. When the processes finsh they terminate and are supposed to return the memory they are using to the pool so to speak. Sometimes the OS screws up and the memory does not get returned for use and if this happens a few times you can get errors due to not enough available memory. This was quite prevelant with Windows 98 and even in 2000 but is somewhat fixed in XP.
When you reboot basically everything is reset and the memory that was tied up is now available in the use pool. That is why rebooting usually fixes this type of error and lock up.
Hope this helps explain what is going on a little bit.