Because a typical stack size is 1 MB. It's the default under Windows.
Not to say it is limited to one MB. It can be larger (or smaller), but I just did not want to type that out.
Which would probably be too much for the stack.
Yes. This is probably the main cause for the problems.
There is one computer (laptop) with 3 GB of memory, and one machine (university) with 0.5 GB of memory.Physical memory on your machine is about 3 Gb and swap is about 2 Gb; so total virtual memory is 5 Gb not 0.5 Gb; not sure how you get 0.5 Gb.