how do i make my compaq presario 5000 have more memory as the low mem icon is always coming on is it a new hard drive or mother board or what as im a novice who wants to learn i have just had dvd rewriter put in is this anything to do with low memory if so please tell me as im lost what do i need thankyou if reply. it is a amd duron 700mhz 64 mgb ,10 gb hardrive 56 k modem theire is hardly no space about 200mb there is always the low memory sign and there is nothing i can unistall to free space what can i do

Is this a desktop or laptop?

Presario 500? I find a 510 & other 500 series but not a 500.

http://h10025.www1.hp.com/ewfrf/wc/siteHome?lc=en&cc=us

What is your Operating System? How much RAM do you have?

You can use this scan to find Memory Modules

http://www.belarc.com/free_download.html

Also how large is your hard drive & how much is free?

Local Drive Volumes from the same scan.

You will also see System Model there.

There are two things that people refer to as "memory" and they are very commonly confused. However, they do 2 entirely different things so it's important to understand the difference.

You have 64 megabytes of Random Access Memory (RAM) fitted inside your PC. This is a small but very fast area of memory in the system for the files and data that your system is using at this point in time. As you open documents, pictures, programs, etc on your system, they take up more of the available RAM. When you close them, they delete themselves out of RAM, making your system more responsive to the files that you want to use next by having RAM spare for use by the files that you are you are about to use. This is the true meaning of the word "memory" in most conversations. For example, a "memory" upgrade is upgrading from 64Mb of RAM to 128Mb of RAM, etc.

You have a 10 gigabyte hard drive installed inside your system. One gigabyte is approximately 1000 megabytes. Therefore, 10 gigabytes is approximately 10,000 megabytes. You've said that your system only has 200Mb of free space left on the hard disk. As you can see, that's only 2%. Your hard disk space is where all of your programs, documents, pictures and other data are saved inside your PC - that's why they don't get forgotten when you unplug the power from your system.

I won't go into the technicalities of what "virtual memory" is as that will confuse almost any novice but it's enough to say that you do need to keep a bit of space free on the hard disk, partly to be able to save new files but also to be able to keep your system running efficiently. 200Mb is about the minimum that you should have available on most systems - some would need more than that.

So, as you can see, you have two problems. One is that your system doesn't have much RAM. The other is that you don't have much free disk space. However, the extent of the problems and how much they might affect you is hard to guage as it depends on lots of different factors.

One important factor is what version of Windows you are running. From the age of your system, I would guess that it's Windows 98 or Windows Millennium (Windows ME). You can find this out by clicking your Start Menu. It tells you in the blue bar that runs up the left-hand side. What version is it?

One of the other important things for us to know in order to give you advice is the EXACT error message. Could you please write it all down the next time it appears and tell us what it says. If it's a long message, I'm afraid we do need to know ALL of it - Microsoft wrote it all because it's useful to us "techies" !!

Hope to hear back from you soon

Another useful thing to check is to right-click on the My Computer icon on your desktop just after you start the PC up. Select 'Properties' from the menu that appears. In the bottom of the box that appears (if you've got the 'General' tab selected), does it give you an amount of "Free system resources" expressed as a percentage? If so, could you tell us how much you've got free, e.g. 90% ?

Oh yeah, I forgot to say anything about the thing that concerned me the most about your posted comment. Do you know that your system is fast enough to run a DVD-writer drive properly? The reason that I ask is that I have a laptop at work that has a processor 3 times faster than yours and it has 8 times as much RAM but, when I attach an external DVD-writer drive, it really makes my system work hard.

Do you only get "memory" errors when you're trying to record a DVD or CD?

If you aren't sure whether your system is fast enough for what you've had fitted, let us know the make and model of the DVD drive and we might be able to find some important and useful information on the manufacturer's web site