Windows becomes unresponsive when trying to create large variables

When I was trying to make matlab deal with a large matrix, my whole system became unresponsive. I understand it's the memory issue, because the code worked fine when I was testing using smaller matrix. Now my question is, is there any way to make matlab give 'out of memory' error instead of freezing everyting? Or stop the code when used memory exceeds certain value?

Answer 1

[Walter Roberson]

http://www.mathworks.com/matlabcentral/answers/34923-limiting-matlab-memory-usage