SPSS hard limits are about 2.1 billion cases (2**31 cases) and about 2.1 billion variables.

However, your computing environment probably causes much lower limits.

What OS are you on?

How much free disk space do you have? How long since you did a disk check and defragmentation?

How big is the .sav input file? the uncompressed scratch data file should be about 35000*300*8 bytes = 84,000,000 bytes. Even for sorting you shouldn't need more than about 3*84000000 bytes = or 252M.

Are you creating a lot of files?

If you are doing several procedures do some of them work, and then you get the error or do you get the error immediately?

Does just a Get File . . . execute . . .

have the problem?

What exact error messages are you getting? (should be in .spo and .jnl files.)

Are you running standalone or from a server? for the data? for SPSS itself?

Does you OS allow you to see if you are running virtual?

Art Art@DrKendall.org Social Research Consultants University Park, MD USA (301) 864-5570

Jeff Hayes, Ph.D. wrote: > Hi, > > I'm running an albeit ancient spss 10.1 with a rather large dataset (n=35,000 > with approx 300 vars) and am running into frequent spsswin.exe errors that > cause unrecoverable program crashes. I would like to figure out my options > besides upgrading to a newer version of spss, which might not solve the problem > anyway. I'd rather not spend the $$ on spss when my current version has all of > the stats functionality I need. Instead, I was considering upgrading to a new > machine with 1gig of ram (I have 512mb now). Does anyone have a sense of > whether this would reduce the instability of my spss 10.1? Does spss 10 have > any hard limits on its usage of ram or the size of working datafiles? > > There is also a setting in Options -> Special Workspace Memory Limit which is > now set at 512k. I tried to increase it to 5mb, but it still seems to be > throwing errors. > > Any advice is much appreciated. > > Cheers, > Jeff > > __________________________________ > Do you Yahoo!? > SBC Yahoo! DSL - Now only $29.95 per month! > http://sbc.yahoo.com >