"Program too big to fit in memory".

Hey, everyone.

I have a laptop here, which keeps giving me an error when I try to run applications. The error, as stated in the title, is "Program too big to fit in memory", which flashes up for a second in a cmd window.

I have tried reinstalling XP on FAT32 and NTFS, and I have also tried installing a trial of Windows 7 on NTFS, just to test it. Multiple executables all give the same error on all of the above setups.

The laptop has a 30gb hard drive, and 512mb of RAM.

Running the "mem" command in a command prompt window in XP shows:

Code:

655360 bytes total conventional memory
655360 bytes available to MS-DOS
592976 largest executable program size

1048576 bytes total contiguous extended memory
0 bytes available contiguous extended memory
941056 bytes available XMS memory
MS-DOS resident in High Memory Area

Just to clarify, I have tried multiple executables, which are in no way corrupted or incompatible, they all show the same error.

Any help or insight into this issue would be much appreciated.

Thanks,
Tom. :)

The problem has now been solved. I went to reinstall the OS, but this time I used the command prompt to format the hard drive thoroughly, rather than a quick format. I have no idea why that worked, but it did. Sorry for wasting anyone's time. I think the laptop knew that I posted here, and just decided to work to make me look foolish. :P

Thanks anyway, to anyone who may have read this.