Not enough Virtual Memory?

[lucius sulla]

I have been using Elements 2.0 successfully on a new 40GB hard drive with 4 partitions of about 10GB each. I have 480MB of memory (ram). Today I received the following error message when trying to run Elements.

"Could not start Adobe Photoshop because the volume Windows is using for virtual memory does not have enough free space, which could lead tp stability problems. See Windows help for information on increasing available virtual memory."

Free space on the Drive is 6.78GB. I am using Windows ME default setup for managing virtual memory. I have uninstalled Elements and re-installed, but the problem persists. I have no errors in my System Devices and the last time I used Elements it ran successfully. All other applications I use including Acrobat run successfully.

I have installed Elemets on a 2.1GB harddrive and it works fine.

Has anyone seen this before?

Many thanks.
Lucius

[RobertHJones]

Lucius,

Try defragging your drive, it's possibly too fragmented to allocate more
virtual memory space.

Windows "virtual memory" (also called the "paging file" or "swap file") is a
file allocated by the operating system on your hard drive. It is used to
extend your RAM when the needed memory is greater than the amount of RAM you
physically have installed in your system. It's expanded automatically as
needed provided there is enough free space on the disk. The space needs to
be contiguous, so if the disk is fragmented, it might not be possible to get
enough space to expand the file and you'll get the message you described.

The default size of the paging file is 1.5 times the amount of RAM installed
on the computer. You probably should increase that somewhat since digital
image editing programs like Elements use a lot of RAM. Pre-allocating a
larger paging file will also reduce the need to expand the file during use
and help to avoid the problem you're having. The new size will be effective
next boot-up.

The amount you need will depend on how many memory resident programs and
processes you have running at the same time and the amount of memory each
requires to operate.

If you have more than one physical disk, you should allocate the virtual
memory file on the physical disk that you don't boot from.



Bob