QB Pro 2003 keeps crashing with various 'Quickbooks needs a minimum of 2.5 meg of memory' and 'Memory is low. Quit quickbooks now' errors. We have 512 meg of memory installed on a Win2k SP4 machine, an 8-hundred and something swapfile, no spyware that I can detect, and no problems with any other software. Does it with 2 diferent company files that work fine on other machine. Any ideas?
Update: I've just reinstalled over previous install (ie. no uninstall), then applied Technical Update 2, which now fails at about 20%- file not found. This is getting worse. Will I wreck my company file by using it in my now-mangled install of QB2003?
My guess would be that QB is correct and there's either a resource-hogging issue or your memory is going bad. HP and Norton are two well-known resource-hoggers. Try ending extraneous processes, one at a time, to try to isolate a resource problem. If your computer will accept additional memory then I'd suggest that route just because more memory is never a bad thing. Its pretty cheap over here and a worthwhile investment.
Uninstall Quickbooks and start over or you'll be getting error messages left and right and I do think its possible to damage a company file with a bad installation.
I would do a complete scan on the machine for viruses and spyware. There are numerous free versions of anti virus software and anti spyware. I'd run them all. Google for them. It'll take time, but I've noticed that occasionally one program catches something the others didn't. Avast, Panda, Trendmicro, just to name 3, all have free versions that are great. That being done, ... I'd take a closer look at the machine itself. What programs are running in the background? Any programs that can be uninstalled? Anything look unusual? Did this just start happening? Anything change on the machine? I'd crack open the task manager, and the processes tab and take a look around.
Regarding your memory going bad:
You can test it: go here to learn more
formatting link
- without a doubt, memtest is useful for everyone. Everyone should run their memory through memtest at least once. Lots of unexplained error messages and crashes are actually caused by bad memory. Create a boot disk from the ISO image available on this site, and then set your machine to boot 1st from the CD drive (from with the BIOS), run the tests overnight and in the morning you'll know if your memory is good or not. I'd set it to run the extended tests by the way.
How often do you reboot your machine? Windows 2000 SP4 is pretty stable, but over time memory leaks, either in the OS or in some of the programs running, could cause resource issues. Rebooting the machine every day or every few days should cut down on issues if memory leaks are the cause.
Re: Reinstalling QuickBooks on top of itself:
I'd uninstall the current installation, move the data files to a safe place (desktop?), reboot the machine, remove the old QuickBooks folder, Reinstall to a new clean never used before installation folder, after successful install, reboot the machine, then update it. You should be fine. Complete uninstall, and then reinstall to a new and clean directory uses fixes things like Bob Villa[1].
Hope some of this helps.
-Elw00de
[1] a very popular repair man in the states, who not only had his own repair show, but did several commercials and ad campaigns for various hardware stores.
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