[PB Herman]

I use a Mac PowerBook 165 running System 7.1 (I think). This laptop has functioned well since 1993. Occasionally, if it freezes and requires a forced power-off, I must reboot it from my Norton Emergency Startup Floppy. (Normal boot-up at this point gives me the "question mark floppy".)

For the first time this is failing. The Emergency floppy spins, I get happy Mac, the hard drive spins, the Norton app begins to launch, and I get the following error message:
"There is not enough memory to open a window. Quit and allocate the application more memory. Read the manual for other suggestions."

Not only has this never happened before, but of course I can't be out of memory because nothing else is running.

Any suggestions?

[PB Herman]

Seems odd to reply to myself, but I tried clearing the PRAM (<Apple><Option><P><R> during startup) and it worked! I suspect the PRAM holds some basic memory usage parameters.

[PB Herman]

While we're here, any ideas why my hard drive can't find itself during boot-up after I've had a forced power-off? (Thus requiring rebooting from Norton Utilities Emergency Disk which subsequently finds nothing wrong with the hard drive...)

[whelm]

I'm not sure about this but did your computer come with a disk with the operating system on it. If i did then you should be able to boot your computer with the disk and there should be a way to fix the boot configuration.

Ive done this with windows Vista.

[Headrush]

Sounds like the internal CMOS battery might need to be replaced.