Howdy:
I was scanning 2-1/4" X 2-1/4" B&W negatives last night and saving the images on an external HD. After scanning about 14 negs. I got the following message: "Scanner could not allocate required memory. Quit other applications and try again." The only application I had going was CS3. The scans were about 2 GB ea. more or less after retouching and dust cleanig. My Vista PC have 4RAM/1TB HD and I'am saving the files on a 500GB external HD.

My HD's are OS (C:) 1 TB practically empty, Recovery (D:) 4.69 GB Free of 14.9GB and 3 ext HD's G,H and J.

Is this a Virtual memory problem, how do I fix this?

This is way over my head to understand but this is how we learn from watching posts like yours. Good Luck and it is nice to see you pop in here.
Tina B

It could be a couple of things, virtual memory being one of them.

To check VM, (and I'm hoping Vista is about the same as XP here) right click My Computer, select Properties, then Advanced. On the Advanced tab, select Performance -> Settings. In the window that opens, select Advanced again, Virtual Memory -> Change. The general rule here is to have 1.5X the Virtual Memory as you have installed memory, so if you have 4G of RAM installed, you would want that set to 6G. Your machine may also have a recommended level showing. Now, if Vista's set up is nothing like XP's, this may all mean nothing to you! (I hope not!)

To actually change the amount of Virtual Memory allocated, select your drive, the click the radial button for the settings you want to configure, fill in the boxes if you're going to do something other than let Windows manage your memory, keep clicking OK/APPLY until you close all the boxes you opened, then restart the PC to make the changes effective. It is also generally recommended to NOT put the VM on the same drive as your OS is, but mine is and I haven't had any problems with it yet. It does tend to make the HD work a bit harder, which can wear it out faster. I generally replace or upgrade them before that happens due to needing more space, so I can't say I've really had one completely die on me. But now that I've said that - I will need to be ever vigilant!

2G scans are rather large, but I would think your machine could handle that. If not you may want to lower your quality settings a bit. But you probably know a lot more about what you need for what you're doing, so I'll shut up now.

You can also check your running processes. Bring up the Task Manager (CTL-ALT-DELete in XP) and see what is running. All those processes take up memory space and if you have a lot of things running that don't need to be, you could probably shut some of the down while you're scanning to free some memory up. You can also check while you're there to see how much memory is actually being used at the time.

Keep as few programs open as possible while scanning. This will help also.

Thank you Tina, your thoughts and intentions worth a million.
Gene;
They are very similar XP and Vista so when i get home tonight will see what I can get done. What pussels me is the fact that i'am saving the pictures on an ext HD. It was passed midnight so I desided to go to bed and post the question this morning. Thanks for your help.

HD space and RAM are 2 different things. Too many people confuse the two, thinking that HD space is memory and it isn't. While virtual memory uses HD space in order to function, this space is used dynamically much the same as RAM memory is, constantly exchanging data with the CPU on an as needed basis. The system keeps this space segregated from the rest of your files stored on the HD, be they internal or external. When you set your virtual memory size, you are telling how much of the HD to reserve for system use. You have plenty of HD space for storing your files, etc. It's the amount reserved for VM that we are concerned about here.

Gene, my problem was I chuck the system by first scanning from Photoshop insted of directly from the scanner software. And two I was scanning 3 and 4 negs at the time. Each neg was prodicing a 3689 average file size on 2-1/4" size when I re-sized those files to 11" X 11" ea. the sky felt down on me Nothing, one more learning experience under the bridge.

Now, for the benefit of others:
1- when you scan a large negative do it directly from your scanner software then save it. Then open Photoshop and do your thing then save a master with all layers on Tiff format.
2- do not scan from Photoshop > Import > (your scanner) and then do your scan this method will give you problems.
Just my 2 centavos on this hope someone will benefit from my experience.

THANK YOU for your help Gene.

Sometimes we just try to do too much at one time!

Glad I could help!