laptop memory issues

[Phaelax]

Got a friends Dell Inspiron 4000 laptop.

p3 700mhz
256mb ram
Win XP

Before windows can even load, it displays the following:

The amount of system memory has changed. F1 to continue or F2 for setup

Windows loads just fine passed that point. (as well as can be expected on that system)

I've checked the bios, no memory properties to even change. Any idea why this would come up every bootup?

EDIT
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I get a new error now:

Memory write/read failure at blah blah, read blah blah, expecting blah blah.
Decreasing available memory.
The amount of system memory has changed.

So.....bad memory?

[extofer]

Check your virtual memory setting once in Windows, aslo, shut off system resources that are not needed. Maybe you're trying to run too many system apps that are not needed (or even overloaded with Spyware or trojans) Check that out.... it seems that could be the problem if the physical hardware is fine.

[Phaelax]

If I get the memory error during POST, it'll boot into windows. When I don't get the memory error, I'll get a DLL error while trying to load Windows. Which one happens seems to be random.

On the few occasions I've managed to get into Windows, it's running fairly clean. (i could tell it hadn't been on the internet very much) Nothing much installed and no spyware that I could find. I've also got it running with only 26 processes.