system memory low (BSOD)

[sam moore]

:mad: Win 98SE, 300M AMD, 256M Ram, 30G HD,(14 used). I haven't added or done away with anything. One morning I woke up and saw the BSOD. So for the past couple weeks, I've ran adaware, spybot S&D, moosoft The Cleaner, each several times. Also scanned for viruses.Each program, I would ensure they had up to date info. Have taken the lid off and cleaned inside. I can be away from the machine and hear the hard drive just clicking away, when I wake it up, the HD stops the activity.
When the blue screen comes on, it says " System Memory is extremely low,Norton Antivirus may not be able to protect from viruses. Press any key to continue.
I press the spacebar, the desk top appears, I move the cursor to anything to open up,click the mouse, WARNING, Not enough memory.
I shut down, restart, works fine for half a day (maybe).
Any help would be appreciated.

P.S. Can't afford a new one right now, even though they are dirt cheap.

[ghost2003]

Download everest and go under operating system>processes and it should tell you howmuch memory every process is using so you can locate the problem. Im not sure if it will work in 98 though.
http://www.lavalys.com/products/overview.php?pid=1&lang=en&pageid=1

[GaryRouth]

If the error message always mentions Norton, it's possible that there could be a problem with Norton itself, that malware has compromised Norton, or that too many background processes are causing system resource issues.

You've already checked for spyware - when you scanned for viruses, did you use Norton? If you haven't already, you could try an online virus scan (assuming the machine is stable enough to make it through the scan) - I often recommend HouseCall http://housecall.trendmicro.com . . . This helps to make sure a virus hasn't got past Norton and then caused it grief.

If you've already run LiveUpdate recently, and the problems persist, you could try uninstalling/reinstalling the software & running LiveUpdate yet again.
- - - - - - -
The system resources angle can be checked easily: right-click My Computer, choose "Properties", choose "Performance" and note the percentage of resources available. When in the 80% to 90% free range, Win98 runs well. Lower than 70%, and some programs have trouble. If you suspect a system resources issue [in this particular case, there are many other possibilities], it can't hurt for you to read up on the system resource situation in Win9x. There's a good overview over at pacs-portal - http://www.pacs-portal.co.uk/startup_index.htm - - - The article helps explain how to use the msconfig utility to narrow down issues. Using that utility, you can limit the programs starting at system startup - if Norton's memory issues disappear, you can then consider which programs you can live without running all the time, or which might benefit from an update or patch to fix it's "memory-leak" problem.

. . . Gary

[rjfvillarosa]

When the blue screen comes on, it says " System Memory is extremely low,Norton Antivirus may not be able to protect from viruses. Press any key to continue.
I had exactly the same situation on one of my machines running 98SE, I uninstalled Norton and everything came back fine, I installed more memory and reinstalled Norton and it was OK.
You say funds are limited, how about uninstalling Norton( a known system resource hog) and installing AVG from grisoft, it is a free antivirus scanner and very good.
www.grisoft.com

[sam moore]

I'd like to thank each of you for your help! Uninstalled Norton, downloaded AVG from Grisoft and so far everythings fine. AVG found what it classed as 3 TROJANS in Zip files in " MyDocuments". I wonder why Housecall, Norton, Adaware, Or Spybot S&D didn't detect these files?
Can Trojans, or viruses have any type of time release aspect to them, where they lay dormant for a predetermined time?

[glc]

An antivirus has to be set to "scan within archives" to find anything in a Zip file.