"The Finder does not have enough memory available"

Question

"The Finder does not have enough memory available"
Situation: G4 (AGP Graphics), OS 9.0 with tons of memory.
Problem: Only with any browser viz Explorer, Communicator, iCab or Opera (all versions). Starts off fine. I have broadband. Then steadily goes slower and slower till virtually stops even with just the one browser and one window and no other programs in use. Try to do anything else and above message appears. The problem seems to involves the operating system and the way it interacts with the code of certain sites eg Ebay. It has nothing to do with PRAM, or allocation of memory to the browser or deleting various Preferences. The deletion of Finder, Memory etc Preferences, quitting, restarting all deal with the symptoms and are not a permanent cure. The primary symptom is a massive loss of available memory, not even enough to run a single browser and one window! Any simple solutions? I realise I can upgrade to OS 9.2. Will this work? Apart from this browser problem I am happy with my present set so is there a simpler solution apart from upgrading?

Answer 1

Thankyou to all for the welcome and your responses to my query.
I have 640mb of RAM. The problem is intermitent and is determined to a great extent by the sites which I visit. Yahoo for example is great - no problems. In another window visiting eg Ebay will eventually (variable) cause a slowdown. I have switched Virtual Memory on and off, changed cache, program allocations of memory, regularly used Norton Utilies to inspect, repair, defrag etc and looked all over the place for advice. Things run great for a while but it is only a question of time , months or even days, before the problem re-appears. I was surprised to find so little about it on the Web. Perhaps everyone else has upgraded or is on OS X! If I could have done something without upgrading I may have gone for that option as everything else is running like a dream and I want to keep it that way! I use programs such as Paperport (sadly not made for OS X) which I find a marvellous scanning and paperwork management program. To get it to work with OS 9.0 I had to determine with Cassidy & Green's marvellous extension conflict identifier Conflict Catcher that the Control Strip needed disabling. If I upgrade, I could, for Paperport et al, upset the Apple cart! I have also read about a program called Reaper which was used to deal, I believe, with Finder memory problems with OS 7 and OS 8. It is still available on at http://www.versiontracker.com/dyn/moreinfo/macos/3783 Apart from this I know nothing more at present about it.
However, the following was one item which I found of great interest which goes along with your advice of upgrading.
From http://www.icab.de/faq.html#q36
"Mac OS 8/9: Why does iCab 3.0 complain that it is running out of memory all the time?
This is not a bug of iCab, it's a bug of the "classic" MacOS 8.5/8.6 (and maybe OS 9.0 as well). The problem occurs when a web page has web forms with text input fields. The Unicode text input fields (MLTE) of these old MacOS releases do still have some serious bugs. One of theses bugs causes the MacOS to reserve almost all available memory for these text edit fields so there's no memory left for iCab. Apple has fixed this bug in MacOS 9.2.x (maybe in 9.1 as well), so the best solution for this problem would be to upgrade the MacOS. If this is not possible, you can disable the Unicode text input fields in the preferences dialog of iCab in the panel "Operation > Browser, Tabs". Switch off the option "Use Unicode TextEdit" to configure iCab so that it will use the "ancient" text edit fields, which do work OK, but which do not support Unicode".
Here is someone with a similar problem back in 2000:
"From TacitRF
Date: Thurs, Jun 8 2000 12:00am
Email: [email protected] (TacitR)
Groups: comp.sys.mac.system
This is ridiculous! I have hardly touched this machine today. Does RAM get eaten up while the computer is sitting there idle (and sleeping every now and then after I've checked email or looked at a couple newsgroup posts)?
Yes, it can, under certain circumstances.
Open your TCP/IP control panel. Click the Options button. (If there is no Options button, select Edit->User Mode, and click "Advanced.") Is "Load Only When Needed" turned on? If it is, you may severly fragment the memory in your computer every time you start a program that uses the Internet. Let's say, for example, you launch Netscape. Netscape tries to access the Internet. This causes TCP/IP to load, on top of Netscape. Now, when you quit Netscape, the memory it was using may not get freed up. Launch Outlook. It loads TCP/IP. Now, when you quit Outlook, you may not get its memory back either". Try turning off Load Only When Needed in the TCP/IP Options, see if that solves
the problem. Hope that helps!"
I find that whatever I do one way or another the slowdown will eventually reappear. A bit like weeding gardens and washing dishes! Well unless there is a way of dealing with OS 9.0 memory behaviour with browsers it looks like an upgrade will have to do!
  Mac OS 9.0.x