Is there a way to constrain the memory used for a notebook (session)?

Question

I know that we can constrain the memory usage of certain computation using MemoryConstrained.

Is there a way to constrain the memory of each cell evaluation during the whole notebook session? Say for a particular session, I want to give Mathematica only 3 GB ram.

I want this because most of the time, unintentionally, I use up all my 4 GB of ram. And on Windows running out of memory hangs the system, so recently I have been unplugging the power a lot. :(

Answer 1

I think what Kuba is hinting at in his comment is something like this

$memLimit = 30000;
$Pre = 
  Function[expr, 
    MemoryConstrained[expr, $memLimit, Print["memory limit exceded"]], 
    {HoldAll}];

Clear @ t; t = Table[i^15, {i, 450}]; ByteCount[t]

28056

Clear @ t; t = Table[i^15, {i, 1000}]; ByteCount[t]

memory limit exceded