Answer
This question was answered on September 22, 1999.
Much of the information contained herein may have changed since posting.
There are a couple of things you might want to do to free up some ram, but you may be getting an erroneous message. We'll discuss that later. What we are going to do is to decrease the amount of programs that will be opening at startup. To do this , right click the start button on your desktop, then select open. After you do that , you will double click on Programs, then double click on startup. This will open a window listing all the programs that will be opened when Windows starts. These programs do not actually run when they are opened, but put in the background so that when you start to run them, they are already loaded into RAM and are therefore accessed a little quicker. Access time to these programs is slower if they are removed from the startup folder, so carefully weigh your options regarding which programs you use the most and therefore would prefer to have quicker access to. After you have decided which ones you can afford to remove from the startup folder, highlight them individually and then press the delete key. Right clicking and then selecting delete will have the same effect.
As for the virus (es) itself. Some viruses are tsr's, which means terminate and stay resident. This means that every time you boot up, that virus will go to work, be it to supply an erroneous message or to actually do damage to your system. SOme viruses also infect Word documents or Excel macros. It would not hurt to replace (not necessarily increase ) your memory.
