Maya crashing

At one point through the process of modeling and putting the environment together Maya started crashing constantly. 

At first I thought that maybe after hours of working my computer had enough and cannot keep going so I obviously restarted it.

It didn't help.

I then thought that maybe running all the software at once wasn't doing it any good so I started working in one program at a time.

That didn't help either,.

I made new scenes, new projects etc. 

But that wasn't the problem either.

I was so close from just wiping the whole computer (which wouldn't be ideal considering the deadline was getting very close) 

But then I realized that maybe it's the memory issue... Turns out that for the purpose of this project I brought a ton of huge photographs and a lot of other things back onto the computer which meant that I pretty much used up nearly all of my memory... So there simply wasn't enough space for Maya to keep working.

It's the stupidest thing I could possibly do, but after I realized I deleted all the photos and useless junk and not only it worked fine, and Maya no longer crashed, but it ran a lot faster.

That's the problem if you've got so much space on your drive, you never tend to look at how filled it is till you're in that kind of situation and don't even consider that to be a problem.

I will try to keep an eye out for that from now on!