Windows 8.1 error: Not enough memory to move a file

Question

I have Windows 8.1 installed on a machine with an i5 at 2.5 Ghz and 16GB of installed RAM. There is about 80GB free disk space. When I'm trying to move one file from one folder to another, I get this error:

There is not enough memory to complete this operation.

The size of the file is a bit under 3 KB. The system barely uses 2GB of memory right now. I also let the system manage the virtual memory settings, since I thought maybe changing those would create some unforeseen problems. But still Windows 8.1 can't move a small file from one place to another, although there are plenty of system resources. I'm also using admin privileges so I don't think this could be an issue.

Answer 1

I have been facing same issue for a while, found that the shortcuts which give this error are actually in Public Desktops. Go in users>public>public desktops and delete it from there. It will update user specific desktop as well

Answer 2

I got similar problem with pdf file I couldn't copy on usb I just pack it to archive and after this Win 8.1 have no problem with it any more.

Answer 3

It's just a misleading error message. The true cause is likely to be the permissions issue: Copying a file on Windows 8 gives “not enough memory” even with plenty of memory and disk.

Quote from the answer:

I downloaded Teracopy and tried using that to copy the file; it too failed but gave me a much better file error message: "Open Error: Access is denied"

I check the file Security Permissions (right click Properties --> Security) and indeed the current user did not have Read Access. I add the permissions and it copied fine.

Answer 4

I got the same error when trying to move a PDF (2MB) file into another folder. I'm running Windows 8.1 with similar resources on my machine.

Turns out I had the file open in Adobe Reader and closing the file fixed the problem.

I recreated the error as well, so not a one-off. Perhaps this is a case of a bad error message