Out of memory error in Illustrator CS5

Question

Giving me 'insufficient memory was available to complete the operation' when trying to place and image (jpg ~23mb) inside a .ai file which is just a few KB large.
Laptop has 6GB physical RAM and 1GB virtual RAM.
Any ideas how to get around it?

Answer 1

I'm coming late to this issue, but my impression is that this is only the tip of the iceberg.  I've been experiencing multiple errors with my three Adobe products since moving from Win 7 to Win 8 (I did this so I could report to my clients -- the report is "don't do it!").
All three products (CS5 for 32 bits, CS4 for whatever CS5 won't handle in a 32 bit system, and Acrobat XI) have worked in perfect harmony for a number of weeks.  When I moved to Win 8, I encountered a number of situations.
The first was the one in this thread.  I would work on an image in PS5 and run out of memory when I tried to save it as a JPEG.  My guess was that the problem was not really in the saving, but in Adobe's method of conversion at the time of saving.  If I saved with the standard baseline, there'd be no problem; but if I saved with an "optimized" baseline, the insufficient memory message would appear.  Apparently, Adobe was trying to do too many operations at one time for the computer to handle.
This is the result of poor programming.  Resource management is a priority when working with images, even moreso when we have moving images.  But I've seen no problem in my Premier4 application, so whoever coded that program knew what they were doing.  The first thing that needs to be done when working with intense memory-draining situations is to parse the operations to fit the amount of available working memory (RAM + fileswap - other resources in use).  In other words, fit the work assignments to the available working space.
Why did this become an issue after I migrated to Win 8?
My guess is that it was because I installed Win 8 over Win 7 and that Adobe neither checked for changes in memory allotment, nor did it make any allowances.  So the kind of distribution of workloads that allowed Adobe to be successful in Win 7 did not work in Win 8.
Another failure of the company!
These issues raise their head on a regular basis -- I noticed the problem go all the way back to Win XP (and maybe even Win 98).  All Adobe products should be designed to confirm their working environment at each boot-up; and if there is a change, then there needs to be a reaching out to the company's servers and an update that tells the products how to accomodate to that change.
I said there were multiple problems.  The rest of these are all in the same category:  permissions.
When I try to use the print>Adobe PDF method of converting a page in IE10 to PDF, it stops with the message that it does not have permission to access the folder in which I am trying to place it (I use folders outside the Windows "Documents" structure).  These folders are sometimes in other partitions, sometimes in external drives.  It makes no difference:  I am not allowed to save there.
This is a problem perculiar to the circumstances.  For example, if I use the Adobe add-on to make the conversion, there is no problem -- I can save it anywhere.  Only if I use the print-through-Adobe-PDF option in IE.  It does not cause problems in Firefox.  It does not cause problems in MS Office 2010.  It does not cause problems in almost any other situation.  But it does in the Internet Explorer container.
I said "almost" anywhere else.  I do get the same issue when I try to save a modified JPEG in Photoshop5 to my other partitions:
And, again, I've read about this issue with earlier versions of Windows, so it doesn't seem to be a Win 8 issue, but rather an Adobe issue that arises when the product is carried through a migration to Win 8 from Win 7 (and perhaps from XP to Win 7 or Vista), instead of being installed in a fresh OS.
Hope the data is useful.
Michael