You receive a "There is not enough memory or disk space to complete the operation" error message when you open a file in Word 2000

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This article was previously published under Q224054

For a Microsoft Word 97 version of this article, see 173908 (http://support.microsoft.com/kb/173908/ ) .

SYMPTOMS

When you try to open a file, the file does not open, and the following error message appears:

There is not enough memory or disk space to complete the operation.

NOTE: Microsoft Office 2000 has built-in functionality that allows you to get more information about difficult-to-troubleshoot alerts or error messages. If you want to enable this functionality for this and other error messages in Microsoft Office 2000, please download the Microsoft Office 2000 Customizable Alerts file from the Microsoft Office Update Web site at the following address:

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=8FBEE1D3-C5BB-4A36-A2F7-DC63DE2A818C (http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=8FBEE1D3-C5BB-4A36-A2F7-DC63DE2A818C)

NOTE: If you reached this article by clicking the Web Info button in an error message, you already have Customizable Alerts enabled.

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WORKAROUND

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There is insufficient random access memory (RAM) on your computer or insufficient disk space available for Word to open the file.

To work around this problem in the short term, use either of the following methods:

You can free RAM memory by quitting unneeded programs, or you can free disk space by deleting unneeded files.-or-
Restart Windows. To do this, on the Start menu, click Shut Down. In the Shut Down Windows dialog box, click Restart the Computer, and then click Yes.

To prevent this problem from occurring in the long term, use either of the following methods:

Add more RAM memory to your computer.

-or-
Acquire more hard disk space, either by adding a larger disk drive or by using a disk compression utility.

NOTE: When troubleshooting this problem, ensure that there are no other programs active and that there is a minimum of 20 megabytes (MB) of free hard disk space. As a general guideline, 20 MB of free space is enough to work with Word files. However, if you frequently work with large documents (10 MB or more), you may need to free some additional space.

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MORE INFORMATION

For additional information, click the article numbers below to view the articles in the Microsoft Knowledge Base:

210335 (http://support.microsoft.com/kb/210335/EN-US/ ) WD2000: Error Message: "Not Enough Memory or Disk Space Saving File in Word 6.0/95"

211326 (http://support.microsoft.com/kb/211326/EN-US/ ) WD2000: Error Messages When You Save File with Low Hard Disk Space

220453 (http://support.microsoft.com/kb/220453/EN-US/ ) WD2000: Not Enough Memory Error Saving File as Web Page

221581 (http://support.microsoft.com/kb/221581/EN-US/ ) WD2000: Error Saving Document with Subdocuments in Word 6.0/95 Format

224632 (http://support.microsoft.com/kb/224632/EN-US/ ) WD2000: Error Message: There Is Not Enough Memory or Disk Space to Display or Print the Picture

For help with common system maintenance tasks in Windows Vista, visit the following Microsoft Web page:

Fix problems with common system maintenance tasks (http://support.microsoft.com/gp/system_maintenance_for_windows)

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