Tag: RAM

If you're old enough, you probably remember what a RAM disk is. Back in the olden days, to squeeze every last bit of juice out of your computer (usually for the purpose of playing Doom), you could load a program into a RAM disk -- a virtual drive made out of spare RAM. As I'm sure you know, RAM is a lot faster than your hard drive Fast forward to today, and most computers have a lot of spare ...

One common complaint about Google Chrome is that it tends to use up a lot of memory. There's a good reason for that, of course -- it has a lot to do with Chrome's built-in crash proofing features. Your tabs are split into separate process, as are your extensions and active plug-ins -- and it's all designed to keep the ship afloat if one component happens to go belly-up. Still, there are ...

Like to keep tabs on where your system resources are going in Windows? If you're running Vista or Windows 7, take a look at Auslogics' FileInspect sidebar gadget. It's a handy way to see how much of your RAM or CPU is being used by the programs you have running. The gadget can display 1, 3, 5, or 10 items at a time and you can also tweak the update interval. You'll likely have more than 10 ...

I'm not the biggest Twitter fan, but let's face it: people sometimes share really useful information in their 140-character updates. Scott Hanselman (@shanselman), for example, tipped users about a slick addition to your Windows 7 taskbar that you'll find over at Codeplex called Taskbar Meters. Download developer Jeff Key's .zip file and extract the contents to a folder on your hard drive. ...

Digsby is probably one of the coolest free Windows applications released in recent memory. The utility is like Pidgin mashed up with Facebook, Twitter, and MySpace, and it has email notifiers for Gmail, Hotmail, and Yahoo! Mail as well as other services thrown in for good measure. There's just one problem: Digsby is a major resource hog. Early builds of Digsby have been known to eat over 100MB ...

Just a week after Digsby widened its private beta by giving away 5,000 invites to Download Squad readers, the development team has already issued 4 new builds of the chat, email, and social networking client. Probably the most significant new feature is support for proxy settings to help users get around corporate firewalls. There are a ton of other bug fixes and minor new features as well, ...

If you covet your RAM like Gollum coveted the ring, then Instant Memory Cleaner should be one of the tools in your toolbox. Designed for XP and Vista, Instant Memory Cleaner frees up your memory by forcing pages out of physical memory and reducing the size of running processes' working sets to a minimum. The program sits in your Windows Taskbar; when clicked, it pops up a small and simple ...

While Firefox enthusiasts swear that the web browser is the best invention since sliced bread or the scientific calculator, there's no question that Firefox can be a bit of a memory hog. When you load your first window, the browser zips along smoothly. But open a few more tabs, do a little navigating back and forth, and before you know it Firefox is eating up half of your system's RAM. Mozilla has ...

From the "if we really thought about it we would have been able to figure this out on our own" department comes a handy tip for speeding up OpenOffice.org -- by increasing its memory use. The open source Microsoft Office alternative is great if you're looking for a low cost word processor, spreadsheet, and presentation application. But it takes so long to load up, especially if you don't enable ...

Sometimes you want to know exactly what is going on with your hard drive. If that's the case, you'll want to try DriveGLEAM. It can monitor physical drives as well as partitions for activity, and report how much free space is left. All of this is done via system tray icons. DriveGLEAM is primarily a hard drive monitoring utility, but also has a few other tricks up its sleeve, like monitoring ...

As I've mentioned in previous posts, for the number of apps I tend to run concurrently, my system is starved for RAM. Yes, I know this could be easily remedied, but until I get around to it I'm really enjoying Cacheman, a Windows app from Outer Technologies that's "designed to improve the performance of your computer by optimizing the disk cache, memory and a number of other settings." ...