Ducati Sporting Club UK > Model Specific - Discussion, Technical Problems and Help > General Motorcycles only > Computer Help Please!!!!!!

[Paul James]

Oh don't you just love dear old Mr. Gates over at Microsoft !!!!.

Been struggling with my "Office 2000" version of "Word" again. I can run it from the CD but when I go to run from the hard drive and select a Word document the PC hangs up and I get the error message in a white box saying "System dangerously low on resources". If I then try to do anything else before rebooting it tells me there isn't enough memory to run anything.

Anybody got any ideas at all ?, I've tried uninstalling Office and reinstalling all to no avail. It does work from the CD but it's so slow I'm sure I will kick the PC off the desk soon while trying to do simple word processing jobs.

Access, Excel and Powerpoint all seem unaffected.

[Glyn]

on xp
ctrl alt delete
then goto applications and shut down anything your not using

[phil_h]

Have you checked your free disc space ?
Not enough 'swap drive space for virtual memory' will give that kind of fault too.
Have you done a 'scandisc' recently ?
A disc error will give this kind of fault too.

[ali]

As with all things microsoft the answer is generally more RAM, more disc space.

If all else fails just use Wordpad, under accessories, and open the file in Word when you need to do more complex tasks.

[guest1]

Usual suspects + :
clean out temp folders
depending on OS clean out local documents\user name\temp
check your word installation for where you have set your default directory (if that directories full then you'll hit problems),
is office trying to set CD drive as default - definitely low resources on there (unwriteable)
when you say run it from CD and then from hard drive...are you changing installation between doing this or just switching straight to hard drive and trying it??????
I don't think that the "System dangerously low on resources" is a word specific dialogue, like Weeksy said most liekly a rogue app.

[clockwork orange]

As Weeksy said, this is definitely a RAM issue. What I have found is all the antivirus and spyware stuff we have to put on PC's running Windows takes up about 150MB of RAM at the peak of usage. So it is sometimes a problem, but not always. To have enough RAM to cover most things these days, then at least 512MB is required. My PC only has 256MB..... .

Hope that helps

[Paul James]

Phew !!!!! thanks guys, I think I'd better admit defeat at the hands of technology ;-)


Weeksy: in the bottom right I have several icons, from the clock leftwards Norton Antivirus, CD creation Wizard, SB AudioPCI 128D Mixer, Task Scheduler.

Using Windows 98 OK I'm still in the dark ages but up to now it's been OK, I don't use the PC for anything fancy, bit of word processing, emailing, surfing.

I'll have a look at the other sites you mentioned for advice.

Once again thanks for all the advice.

[Paul James]

Only got 128mb ram and not a ewe in sight !!!!! Probably not worth trying to put more in as it's an old Gateway 750. Think I will have to get or make a new one. Not sure this machine would run XP but I do seriously appreciate your offer. I've got a copy of Office that works on XP so if I do buy the bits and make one your XP could be handy.

[PDL]

Ahhhh the magic word Norton Anti Virus. Try this:

- Open your anti virus (double click on task bar icon)
- Click options
- Go to other
- click miscellaneous
- If 'how to keep office documents" is enabled then untick it
- Reboot
- open word

Or try turning your Anti Virus off and running word.

Or click run and type msconfig - click startup tab and untick everything except - ScanRegistry, TaskMonitor, SystemTray & LoadPowerProfile. Open word.

This isn't a RAM problem, word is designed to run on minimal resource as long as no other tasks are running, by unticking the tasks you free up resource.

Glyn - there is no ctl-alt-Del option on Win98.