out of memory

[bosco]

Dad's computer.
CPU: AMD Athlon XP 1600+ (266fsb) Socket A
*XP1600+ CPU Speed = 1400Mhz*
CPU FAN: Thermaltake, Socket A, Volcano 5, 4500rpm
MOTHERBOARD: Gigabyte GA-7VTXE
RAM: 256MB DDR PC-2100 (266Mhz)
VIDEO: GeForce2 MX 200 32MB
HARD DRIVE: Western Digital 20GB - 7200rpm
CD: 56x CD-ROM
Floppy: 1.44MB
MODEM: INTEL 56k V.90 PCI
Win98SE

Built: Nov, 2001

I went over there today to install a few games and update their Anti-virus. While I was there, I figured I'd run scandisk and defrag.
I try to run scandisk and I get and error telling me that there is not enough system memory to run scandisk. OK....So I checked and system resources are 90% free. There is 15 Gigs of free space on the hard drive. I shut everything down in the system tray. Same thing. I control alt del and shut down everything running except explorer. Same thing. I check the swap file win386.swp, it's 60MB. So I try to delete it. Windows won't let me. I boot to a DOS prompt and delete it from there. Reboot. Same thing. I don't get it. Everything runs fine. I installed the games(Unreal Gold & Tiger Woods Golf 2002) and they run fine.
When I try to run Defrag I get the same error. I was able to run scandisk from the DOS prompt but not defrag. I do need to defrag the HD. Any Ideas??

[newme]

did you try from safe mode?some machines will do that and need to be run from safe mode

[ktkendall]

What are the actual swap file settings?? If it's set at default, (let windows manage it), then that should not be the problem, but if it's custom set at max=60M, that could be a bit small. A little performane tweak is to set the min and max to the same so that windows doesn't spend time resizing the file and especially with win98 which isn't the greatest at memory management you do want min and max to be more than 60. Some say to set them at 1.5x of your ram, some say less but if your set at 60 max then that IS probably the problem and even setting it back to default of let windows manage it will fix you. I had same trouble on my mom's PC, she had 128M of ram with win98 and I had min and max set to 128 for virtual mem settings and evantually she started getting same problem. I talked her over the phone to set it back to default and it worked. I think for her it was trying to install something she was getting same error message...

[bosco]

Thanks for the replies.

Windows is managing the size of the swap file. So I wouldn't think that the virtual mem size is it. I just mentioned the current size of the swap file. I just happened to look at it and it was 60MB. 60MB is not the limit. The limit is what ever Window default is. Won't the default setting use the whole drive if need be?

Maybe I'll go and manually set the size to 384MB which is 1.5x the RAM. Otherwise, I'm out of ideas.

I'll also head over there and try it from safe mode.

[ktkendall]

OK then it was just something to check, but your right that if its set virtual mem still at default to let windows manage then that should not be the problem..

[galaxian]

The error is caused by the cluster size being invalid in relation to the size of the partition. It generally happens if you use a ghostlike app to clone a smaller disk onto a larger one, and the cluster size of the smaller one is carried over.

Options are to recreate and reload the partition, or use a program like Partition Magic to resize the clusters.

http://support.microsoft.com/default...;en-us;q229154

http://support.wdc.com/tips/index.asp?tip=41

[bosco]

Well that's probably it. I did use an older version of ghost to clone the drive.

[bosco]

That did it. I resized the clusters with partition magic 8. Fixed

[galaxian]

Thought we had lost you!

Thanks for taking the time to post back.