Grey Circle of Death - causes?

usignuolo

Several times recently I have been unable to open images on my pc instead getting the notorious "grey circle of death". (White Exclamation mark in a grey circle on a white screen background).

The only information I can find out about this is that it seems to be some sort of out of memory message. I do not run any self written applications and indeed nothing sophisticated at all. The other night it happened when I was trying to open some photos using Picasa.

I have a windows 7 (64 bit) Dell pc which is only a few months old. I have 16gb RAm, a 1TB hard disk and an i5 processor. I have masses of spare capacity and the memory swap is set to maximum for this machine. So I am baffled why I am getting this, the only thing I have which is not standard is an NVIDIA card for graphics.

The problem is intermittant not permanent. Can anyone suggest possible causes and how I can fix them?

John_Gray

usignuolo wrote: »

I have a windows 7 (64 bit) Dell pc which is only a few months old. I have 16GB RAM, a 1TB hard disk and an i5 processor?

Your gargantuan PC is clearly suffering from small-machine envy!

To be serious, which program is being used to open these 'images'? Do you get the same result with JPEGs, GIFs, PNGs, BMPs, TIFFs...?

usignuolo

It varies, yesterday I was looking at wikipedia and wanted to open one of the images on the page and got the ! for all of the images on the page, and same again when I tried a different page. I then went over to Youtube and got the same thing.

Couple of hours later it had cleared. It doesn't happen all the time If I do a search on it it says it is an Adobe message indicating Out of Memory. But I do not see how I can be out of memory just trying to open a jpeg on line or watch a Youtube video?

John_Gray

With 16 GB of RAM you should never get any paging at all! But it would be worth checking how big your page file is - or even that you have one at all! Check via:

• Hold down Windows key (at bottom left of keyboard) and press Pause/Break key (near top right, probably)
• Click on Advanced system settings
• Click on the Advanced tab, then on the Performance / Settings button
• Click on the (new) Advanced tab
• You will find the "Total paging file size for all drives" in the Virtual memory section
• If you click on the Change... button you'll get another window wherein you would expect to have a tick in the box in front of "Automatically manage paging file size for all drives"

Your problem does seem to be related to memory problems...