Word has insufficient memory.

[Guest]

I try to open a ".mht" file, and before anything else happens I get the message
Word has insufficient memory. You will not be able to undo this action
once it is completed. ..."

The file does open, complete with pictures.

The file's length is 256KB. It's a page from a website.

Task Manager says 309MB physical memory available.
Commit charge total 409MB, peak 1329 MB, peak 476MB.

Using Word 2003 SP2 on XP Home.
Pagefile = 307, 200 KB.
Physical memory = 768 MB.

What memory is insufficient?
Is word unable to allocate sufficient virtual memory? (Is my page file too
small?)
Is physical memory too small?
Is Word trying to load all material from a tree of links, instead of only
the immediately visible material?

Regards,
Bob

 

[Cindy M.]

Hi =?Utf-8?B?YW5nYm9i?=,

I try to open a ".mht" file, and before anything else happens I get the message
Word has insufficient memory. You will not be able to undo this action
once it is completed. ..."

The file does open, complete with pictures.

The file's length is 256KB. It's a page from a website.

Task Manager says 309MB physical memory available.
Commit charge total 409MB, peak 1329 MB, peak 476MB.

Using Word 2003 SP2 on XP Home.
Pagefile = 307, 200 KB.
Physical memory = 768 MB.

What memory is insufficient?
Is word unable to allocate sufficient virtual memory? (Is my page file too
small?)
Is physical memory too small?
Is Word trying to load all material from a tree of links, instead of only
the immediately visible material?

The message usually indicates that something is writing so much information to
the "scratch" files (that maintain the Undo list) that they're overflowing. Most
often, you'll see this when doing a lot of work with tables.

When you open a different file format, Word runs a converter to put the document
into the native file format (*.doc) so that you can edit it. My guess would be
that it's a result of the converter's work writing to that format.

As far as I know, the scratch file size can't be changed anywhere.

Cindy Meister
INTER-Solutions, Switzerland
http://homepage.swissonline.ch/cindymeister (last update Jun 17 2005)
http://www.word.mvps.org

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[Guest]

Thanks, Cindy,

Your explanation makes sense.

Even after hundreds of years and trillions of dollars in development, Word
likely still suffers from fixed-size allocations. And I wouldn't be
surprised to find that whoever constructed the error message cannot
distinguish between "memory" and "file".

Regards,
Bob (Northeast USA)


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