Some of us aren’t lucky enough to have brand new computer systems that are loaded with memory and bells and whistles. Plus, many software programs are RAM memory guzzlers, and they don’t “release” that memory when the program is closed. That means that your system is unable to recover that memory and use it with other programs.
When this happens, you get “low memory” messages, or your system may even crash, causing you to lose everything that hasn’t been saved up until that point.
Though this article isn’t a lesson in memory, let me explain in a very simplistic way what RAM (Random Access Memory) is, and why it’s so important to a computer system. Every time you turn on your computer, launch a program, or open a file, the program or data is loaded into RAM. If your computer system has a lot of RAM, you can open more files or programs at once and load bigger files or programs onto your system.
So, RAM is the temporary memory that is required to run your software programs. When you click the “save” button on your system to save a piece of work, you’re now using your long-term storage, or hard drive’s, memory, which is a totally different memory. Information saved to your hard drive is available to you when you turn off your machine and start it again. It’s “permanent.” RAM, on the other hand, is short-term memory, and when your computer shuts down, you lose everything in the RAM.
So, you can see that if you don’t have enough RAM on your system, your software programs won’t operate like they should. As newer software programs are being developed, they seem to use more and more RAM, which makes it even more difficult for your computer to operate efficiently if you don’t have a lot of RAM.
Now that we’ve had our mini lesson in RAM, I’ve found a really neat and inexpensive software program that helps solve your RAM memory problems: MemTurbo II. It will scour your system for memory leaks, or memory that wasn’t released when a software program was shut down.
It operates in the background to where you don’t even know it’s there. You’ll just see a little green “bar” that indicates the amount of available RAM on your system at that time. Every 15 minutes, the program automatically recovers RAM, or whenever your RAM gets below a certain level.
You can even do a “deep scrub” that will find RAM that may not be picked up through a regular recover. I just performed a deep scrub on my system, and it recovered 64 MB of RAM.
MemTurbo II only costs $19.95, which is a bargain for what this little program does. You can even download a trial version of the program and use it free for 30 days.
For me, MemTurbo is a “must have” program, because it helps my computer operate more efficiently and saves me a lot of headaches (and sanity). Visit the MemTurbo site for more information
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