Out of memory?

While trying to help my father-in-law with his printer problems (that's another post), he alerted me that they are having problems sometimes opening programs. They get a message that they are out of memory. I checked and say that their system resources were at about 50%. I did the msconfig thing and got rid of some unnecessary stuff that was loading at Startup. Some of it was pretty nasty. I downloaded Spybot Search and Destroy and found about 125 problems, that I got rid of. They hadn't run a full virus scan with Norton since September, so I did it manually and it deleted a trojan.
The only other things I could think to do were to delete Cookies, Temporary Internet Files, and their History file. I had to leave before I had time to do so. Based on their lack of computer housekeeping habits, (they're kind of up there in years) I am assuming that there will be a lot of the above to delete.
After completing the things listed above that I did have time to do, the system resources went up to like 65 or 70%.
Any suggestions on what I can do to help their computing go easier will be appreciated. It's now tax season and although he is a retired accountant, he still does some returns and likes to use Turbotax. He is running Windows 98, 128 megs of RAM, on an IBM Aptiva.
Thanks in advance.

 

Being low on system resources is not neccessarily a bad sign - it simply means the machine is being worked and if very low then it may not be able to handle more tasks.

The secret with the "msconfig thing" is to have removed those tasks which are surplus to requirements allowing those tasks deemed to be required. I have 10 tasks in my System Tray and boot with 74% of resources. I would sorely miss any one of them. I often run down to 20% and have my machine configured to alert me when it falls below 15% when I either close something down or save work and restart.

We shouldn't run out of memory. Memory is RAM plus the Swapfile. With 128Mb RAM and 896Mb Swapfile the virtual memory manager sees 1Gb. With 256Mb RAM and 768Mb Swapfile the VMM still sees 1Gb. If 512Mb of 'memory' is in use the second case would see a faster machine as more of the 'in use' is the faster memory ie RAM.

The single most significant improvement your father-in-law could make is to add another 128Mb of RAM and if funds allow I'd go to 256Mb.

In addition to your measures have a look at the TEMP folder and remove anything older than a few days. I don't advocate a complete clean out - there may be something in there needed in the current Windows session or the next session. Some folks may disagree with that but not all programmers have good habits and I'd rather be safe than sorry.

 

One thing you can do to keep the Temporary Internet Files under control is to set the browser to delete them when closing. Go the Tools>Options>Advanced tab, scroll down to the "Security" section and put a check mark in the box on the "Empty Temporary Internet Files when browser is close" line.

 

I do that myself, John, but only since getting broadband.

With dial-up and depending upon browsing habits then keeping the TIFs between IE sessions may be worthwhle. In which case the better method of control is to limit the amount of disk space allocated to them since they are managed on a first in, first out basis. Even just a few Mb may be helpful and, again depending upon browsing habits, perhaps 4Mb or even 8Mb may be better. Similarly with 'Days to keep in history' a value of 2 or 3 days can help.

 

I cleaned out their temp files and the system seems to be running much better. I swear they had something like 7000 things to delete. I took John B's advice to set it up to empty the temporary internet files when closing the browser, so hopefully that will help prevent a future problem of this sort. Thanks for the helpful replies.

 

“...set it up to empty the temporary internet files when closing the browser, so hopefully that will help prevent a future problem of this sort.â€

Unfortunately, it won't. TEMP folder contents growth has nothing to do with Temporary Internet Files. Emptying the TIFs on closing the browser is throwing the baby out with bath water. Empting for security reasons is another matter.

Broni is endorsing my earlier comments except I get alerted when I'm down to 15%. I'm always reluctant to Restart because my machine runs a lot faster mid afternoon compared with first thing in the morning. Our machines are on a learning curve from boot up. The, so called, 'Other memory' grows throughout the day reducing disk access. Logging off can help here. It's not the first time that I've been down to 30% resources and got back to 48% with 'Other memory' hardly touched. My 'Other memory' may be larger than most because I do not have dlls unloaded after use. Here we have the baby and the bathwater syndrome again. If the dlls are idle too long the system dumps them anyway. You need idle RAM for this to work and we are back to my suggestion of getting another 128Mb on board.