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When you try to import/export an image file or save an SRF file, and you get a message that you are out of memory, this is generally because your computer is truly out of memory. There are a couple things to know when dealing with this error

1. Surfer treats all images as uncompressed images. The amount of memory required for each image file is:
    
width in pixels * height in pixels * 3 (color depth) * 2

You will need at least this much available memory to import/export the image or save the SRF file. You may be able to reduce the memory requirements by changing the image to 256 colors, which reduces the memory requirement by a factor of 3 (use 1 for the color depth in the above equation instead of 3).  An additional option is to resize the image to a smaller number of pixels.

2. Surfer 9 is a 32-bit program, so the maximum amount of memory that Windows can allocate to the program is 2 GB.  In addition, Windows typically reserves half the RAM for the operating system, so the available memory can be much less, regardless of the amount of RAM and size of your swap file. For example, if you have 2 GB of RAM, only a maximum of 1 GB can be used for Surfer.

In addition, Surfer 8 uses about 10 MB of memory just to start up, and additional memory for each object and operation. When changes are made to an object, the amount of memory used doubles temporarily. Based on these assumptions, the maximum size of an uncompressed image file to import or export is about 990 MB. This is also about the largest SRF file we've been able to save.

3. Surfer 8 requires a contiguous block of memory. The computer may have enough free available memory to save/import/export the file, but if it is fragmented over several blocks, then Surfer can only use the largest block of memory available. If you believe you have enough RAM to import or export the image or save the SRF file, reboot the computer to defragment the memory, close down as many running applications as possible, and then try to import/save/export the image.