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I am trying to install a software for a particle measurement device I am using.

I inserted the CD into my ROM and when I attempt to auto-run, I get the following error message

 "error executing file D:\Software\Setup.exe  the requested operation requires elevation"

Now I looked around and found that, as the message indicates, this is related to administrative privileges on my Windows 8. So now I tried to run the setup.exe as an administrator but then I get the following error message:

There is insufficient memory on this machine. The application recommends 16 MB of memory."

This makes no sense since I've got Intel i7-3610QM 2.3 GHz and 6GB DDR3 memory.

Someone suggested to try to set up a virtual machine and setup winXP on the virtual machine and try to install it there. After all, the software is relatively old. But I figured to try and see if there are alternative and easier methods to fix this problem so I can install the software. Can Stackexchange help me with this?

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    What is the software you are trying to install. That sort of error message generally occurs in older software when it encounters amounts of RAM that you couldn't afford at the time it was made if you owned Jupiter.
    – Dracs
    Apr 4, 2013 at 2:26

1 Answer 1

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Your solution to the first problem is correct. Installers often require elevation. Of course, you should have been prompted to do that automatically, based on heuristics that match common names of installers (e.g., setup.exe). I know this functionality was there in Vista and 7, but perhaps it was removed in Windows 8? I doubt it, but it's of no real consequence to this question considering you've already independently arrived at the appropriate solution.

There is insufficient memory on this machine. The application recommends 16 MB of memory.

This is not a standard Windows error message. I don't recognize it, Google doesn't recognize it, and it specifically mentions "the application", which Windows is unlikely to do. Rather, this looks like a message generated by the installer itself.

The fact that you have 16 GB of RAM is probably confusing it. It probably doesn't know what to do with numbers that large. Someone probably wrote it assuming that 640 KB 1024 MB was more than anyone would ever have/need, and the "sufficient installed RAM" check overflows, thus causing the code to return an erroneous failure condition.

You really should contact the vendor for an updated version. Failing that, you can also try running the installer in compatibility mode, but that's not guaranteed to work. Setting up a virtual machine is what I would recommend as your best bet. Especially if the operation of the software needs to be reliable.

Windows tries hard to be backwards-compatible, but it can't cover every case. Especially those that are the fault of really bone-headed software developers who make assumptions they shouldn't make.

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  • Thanks for this guys. Changing compatability for setup.exe for winXP worked. Very interesting information about the software developers and memory.
    – l3win
    Apr 4, 2013 at 2:52
  • I wonder if the software is being stupid and reading just the 2 most significant figures
    – Journeyman Geek
    Apr 4, 2013 at 3:18
  • +1 for the last sentence. It's always the OS that gets blamed when most of the time it's the fault of badly written drivers, codecs, shell extensions and other programs... As Raymond Chen has noted many times, it's unbelievable how many compatibility shims Windows includes to 'fix' errant software to prevent the OS from being held responsible by clueless users.
    – Karan
    Apr 4, 2013 at 15:56
  • Hmm... I am interested. What do you mean by reading the 2 most significant figures. And if it was due to a memory ceiling like was discussed before, why did it work for WindowsXP compatibility?
    – l3win
    Apr 4, 2013 at 16:12
  • That error message is consistent with trying to install a 16-bit program on 32-bit Windows. (On 64-bit Windows, it'll just tell you "no".) You can try changing the compatibility settings on it, but there's no promise it'll run. I've seen this before because no matter how new your PC is, if you have kids and they have a Barbie game from 1995, they're gonna want to play it.
    – Mark Allen
    Apr 4, 2013 at 19:30

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