I got this message when I tried to print my timesheets about two hours ago. The program that I keep my time in is called Amicus, and I need to finalize and submit my time so I was going to print to file (as is my custom) and send the file to my secretary by email. I'm working from home today. Anyway, I get the aforementioned error message and so I can't print to file. Any ideas yet? (The solution is at the end so don't peek).
Fortunately, I didn't waste too much time trying to solve the problem. My first thought was I had too many programs open and so I closed all of them. Then I tried printing again. No luck. Then I remembered what Buzz told me that he learned from talking to lots of programmers: "memory management is a black art." So I thought, well maybe the memory resources are inextricably committed because once I opened all those programs I couldn't "uncommit" them. So I rebooted, and opened the target program with nothing else open. I tried to print. No luck. Any ideas now? (Don't peek).
So I checked the Amicus website for known issues. I was thinking that all of the time I had entered was "unposted" because the program won't let me "post" unless I send it somewhere. And I have nowhere to send it so it stays in the program; I thought I'd see if the failure to post after a couple of months makes the program think it might have to print a huge file (or something like that). I hunted around, and called tech support and was on hold for about 15 minutes while I did other things. I got impatient and hung up. I was skeptical that they would be able to help 'cause I searched the site for "print" and "memory" (and other seemingly meaningful combos) and got nothing.
Then started thinking from scratch. What change had been made in my computing environment? I was thinking it was the fact that I hadn't posted any of my time over the past months and that some threshold finally was reached. But that wasn't it. I wasn't hooked to my firm's network, that was another thing. But the program I was using is a totally local program; it doesn't connect with the network in any way. Or does it?
Well it thinks it does, because what it needed was to have a default printer that it could "see." My "default printer" was a network printer, and so even though I was printing to file it still wanted to see a default printer that was local. So I made Acrobat Distiller my default printer and guess what? Now it works.
The moral of the story is twofold: (1) troubleshooting is tough because if you self-filter information then you filter the possible problem, but you need to filter to zero in on the problem and so on...; and (2) error messages are often misleading. Insufficient memory was not the problem, and I don't know if that message would even have helped a computer geek figure out the problem. I guess the last moral of the story is that having laptops that are sometimes docked with the "mother ship" and sometimes disconnected creates a whole new world of trouble for computer people.....
