Premiere 5.1-Insufficient RAM error

Question

I just purchased an old, but unopened version of Adobe Premiere 5.1.  Video editing is not my primary job, and something basic is best for us.  The program installed, but when I try to run the program, it alerts me that Premiere requires 5000K of RAM, and can't run.  My machine has 4 Gb of RAM, which I think should be sufficient.
OS is Windows XP SP2
Any ideas as to why Premiere will not start up, and anything I can do to get it to start up.  Any advice would be greatly appreciated.  Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

Hopefully this is better late than never...or will help someone else. I am running Windows XP SP3 also w/4GB of RAM. I have used this method to run Illustrator 7 so I tried it with Premiere 5.1 and the error disappeared and it started up. Have not tried to use it further however. I cannot afford to upgrade all my old Adobe SW  and run Photoshop 5.5 on this system as well. I created the biggest file I could with photoshop (30000 X 30000 pixels). Photoshop reported that this took 858M. Drew on the screen and saved it as a jpg. Made three copies with different names(EATMEMORY1, 2 & 3)  thinking if I opened them all It should eat 2.5M of RAM. Watched using Task Manager and with 1, 2 or 3 open my available Physical Memory stayed near 1.7GB. After closing photoshop it came up to 2.7GB (Total says 3.65GB). Then I ran Premiere and it got past the error. When I killed photoshop the error came back. Opened ONE of the files with photoshop and Premiere worked again. I have not tried it after a fresh reboot so perhaps more than one of files may need to be opened at first, but if you play around with this method it should work, I have been using Illustrator like this for a couple of years. With Illustrator the error was at 2GB of Ram. Good Luck!
UPDATE UPDATE UPDATE
after rebooting, enough memory was not eaten just by opening the files in photoshop. so I stored .bmp files making them the same (858MB), half and a quarter the size thinking I would open them with Paint. Paint could not open the large file, but was fine with the others. The good news is it eats more than double the amount photoshop did. I opened the smallest file twice with paint. That got me below 2GB available memory which seems to be the threshold for Premiere to start. Killed one, would not start etc. With some playing around I am sure you can find the optimum file size so that opening it once, or twice with Paint will get available memory down below 2GB. Don't know how 2GB relates to the 5GB error, but that is the same threshold I needed to run Illustrator 7.
Message was edited by: greggalaviz