Both options have advantages and disadvantages. Buying all new RAM or sets of RAM usually costs more than adding to the existing RAM. It can on the other hand speed things up if you have a slow RAM module in your PC.

The first thing that you may want to do is to check the currently installed memory. Experienced users may know the answer to how much ram their computer has installed, inexperienced users on the other hand can use software to find that out. The easiest way under Windows is to press Windows-Pause and look for the installed memory (RAM) listing in the window that opens up.

But that tells you how much RAM is installed, but not the speed and specifications of the memory. A tool for that is the free software CPU-Z. It is available as a portable version at the developer website. Just download and run it. Switch to the SPD tab in the program. Here you find extensive information about each motherboard slot and RAM module. You see the general type (e.g. DDR3), the module size (e.g. 2048 MBytes), the Max Bandwidth (PC3-10700H) and the manufacturer. Those are all the information that you need to shop for additional RAM modules.

Depending on your motherboard you either need dual channel memory or triple channel memory. You find those information under Memory > Channels.

Lets say you have four slots of memory available, and the first two are occupied by two 1GB RAM modules. You could now make the decision to buy two additional modules to put them in the two unoccupied slots of the motherboard, buy a 2×2 Gigabyte set instead and replace the existing modules or go overboard and buy 4×2 GB modules instead.

If the RAM is old, it is usually better to buy new faster RAM. If you got the computer recently and need more RAM for applications and tasks that you run you may be better off adding RAM to the computer if motherboard slots are available for that.

Which leads to the following question: How much RAM is installed in your computer, and do you think that it is sufficient for what you do with the computer?

The free system tool RamMap can be used to display those information, and a lot more. The program is compatible with Windows Vista and Windows 7, and not Windows XP. It is also compatible with the server variants from Windows Server 2008 on.

When you start the program for the first time you will see a tab based interface that displays information about processes, use counts, physical pages and a file summary.

Here is a short description of each tab:

• Use Counts: usage summary by type and paging list
• Processes: process working set sizes
• Priority Summary: prioritized standby list sizes
• Physical Pages: per-page use for all physical memory
• Physical Ranges: physical memory addresses
• File Summary: file data in RAM by file
• File Details: individual physical pages by file

The file summary tab displays the file data that is currently in the memory. When you switch to that tab you will see a large list of files with their paths, file names and memory information. You can click on a header to sort the table. A click on path for instance sorts by file path which is helpful if you are looking for specific files in Ram. You could also look at the biggest files in RAM with a click on Total, Standby or Active.

Why can a file listing like this be helpful? You could for instance use it to determine if certain files or programs use up a lot of memory when they are running. You could find system drivers or fonts that you do not need to see how much space in RAM they use. Could also be very helpful for software developers who need to analyze their program’s memory usage.

RamMap is more of a tool for advanced users. Having said that, it can still be useful for users who are not that tech savvy. Windows users can download RamMap from the Microsoft Technet website.

The Chrome developers have also added a purge memory button to the task manager that is disabled by default. This button can be used to free up computer memory allocated by the Internet browser. It works in this regard like other tools that free computer memory.

Firefox users can for instance install the Memory Fox add-on to free computer memory while Windows users the computer memory optimizer Minimem.

The purge memory button becomes only available if the Chrome web browser is stared with the startup parameter –purge-memory-button.

The easiest way to do that in Windows is to right-click the Google Chrome shortcut to display the context menu. Select properties from the available choices and locate the Target field in the Shortcut tab. Append –purge-memory-button at the end of that line so that the command to execute Google Chrome looks similar to this:

C:\Users\xxxx\AppData\Local\Google\Chrome\Application\chrome.exe –purge-memory-button

It is necessary to use “” to mark the path if the path to Google Chrome contains spaces.

The Google Chrome task manager can be started with the keyboard shortcut Shift Esc. The purge memory button should be active in the task manager if the startup parameter has been added correctly.

Clicking that button will free computer memory in the web browser. Only memory that is not needed will be purged.

Memory Fox is a memory optimizer for the Firefox 3 web browser. It is only offered for the Windows operating system and can be used to constantly flush Firefox’s memory usage.

Memory Fox, focuses on two ( 2 ) types of memory usage and with flushing for memory recovery. When resource requirements ( Stack and Heap ) have been reached, according to the user’s preset option settings, the memory will be flushed and recovered from Fragmented Orphaned Ram memories.

Memory Fox needs to be activated after installation which can be done in the add-on’s options or from the status bar icon. Activating of the memory optimizer results in constant drops in the memory usage of the web browser which can be observed in the Windows task manager.

The extension manages to keep the memory usage of Firefox 3 below the 100 Megabyte mark most of the time. This does not result in measurable speed improvements but it might be helpful if the computer system is not equipped with lots of RAM.

Memory Fox can be downloaded from the add-on’s Mozilla Firefox profile page.

Minimem is available as a portable and installer for the Windows operating system. It can optimize all running processes of a Windows operating system. Unlike other programs of its kind it offers the user the choice to select the processes that should be memory optimized.

Minimem will only display processes that use more than 15 Megabytes of computer memory. It is possible to change the value to predefined values between 5 and 100 Megabytes. The memory limit can be turned off as well to display all processes in the interface.

Some or all of the active processes that are shown in the interface need to be moved to the left side which indicates that Minimem should optimize them. This gives the computer user excellent control of the optimization process.

Minimem will optimize the computer memory of the selected processes ever 30 seconds by default. This can be changed to several predefined values between 5 and 1200 seconds as well. Minimen will not optimize the active process by default. The program will also skip optimization of the available computer memory is larger than 300 Megabytes. These settings can also be changed in the program interface.

The memory optimization works surprisingly well. Users will see huge memory drops for some of the selected processes, e.g. a drop from 230 Megabytes to 90 Megabytes for a Firefox process or a drop from 33 Megabytes of computer memory to 9 Megabytes for the Winamp process. All of that without a noticeable drop in performance or a rise in virtual memory.

How does the optimization work?

It optimizes memory by removing as many non-necessary memory pages as possible from the selected processes. It does so at regular intervals which can be user-defined as well and every 30s by default, though uses an advanced pooling mechanism to ensure the CPU usage of Minimem remains low at all times. This then optimizes your applications which can load those pages back whenever they need, and makes your overall system perform much better whenever it is memory limited.

Not all applications benefit in the same way from the computer memory optimizer. Web browsers and other memory hungry programs will benefit the most. Minimen is available for the Microsoft Windows operating system. It requires the Microsoft .net Framework 2.0. It is a highly recommended computer program for users who want to optimize their computer memory.

What if there was a tool that would optimize the computer memory without using the virtual memory trick? A tool that would use the Windows API to reduce the computer memory use of any running process without interfering with system performance or stability?

Cleanmem (via Easily Reduce Memory Usage on All Running Processes in Windows) is that software program. The software developer provides a portable and a installation version of his computer memory optimizer on his website. Both versions work fine on 32-bit and 64-bit editions of Windows 2000, Windows 2003, Windows XP, Windows Vista and Windows Server 2008.

If the user installes Cleanmem it will automatically add itself to the Task Scheduler in Windows running in 30 minute intervals. The portable version would have to be executed manually which is also possible for the installer version. Simply entering cleanmem in the command line will do the job. The file will be stored in the system32 directory during installation.

The first screenshot below is a snapshot of the Windows Task Manager. The second a snapshot of the same Task Manager after executing Cleanmem.

A process that needs more memory than it has after memory optimization will simply allocate additional memory. It is not uncommon to see the computer memory of some applications rise to about the level that they have been before. Many however will keep a reduces computer memory size, especially those that are currently not in focus of the user. It basically frees up the memory of applications that are currently running but not in use.

The software developer provides an ignore list with the software program that can be used to exclude applications from the computer memory optimization.

Windows Memory Diagnostic (link, via Vishal) is a dos tool which has to be installed on a floppy drive or CD. It can only be run during system start and not from within Windows. Many users will feel uncomfortable with this procedure but those affected by crashes might probably be inclined to try everything in their might to get to the reason of the crashes.

The tool will start the computer memory check instantly after its interface has been loaded during system startup. It will run test passes and it is important to perform at least one full test pass before quitting the software program.

The first test pass is the most important one. If no errors are found it is unlikely that additional runs will find errors. If errors are found you discovered a possible source for the system crashes, bluescreens and stop errors.

The installation should not pose difficulties for anyone. Buttons to create a startup floppy disk and to save a CD image to disk are provided upon execution. The first will create a bootable floppy disk containing the Windows Memory Diagnostic tool while the latter will create in ISO image windiag.iso that has to be burned to CD or DVD.

An alternative to Windows Memory Diagnostic is Memtest86+ which is highly recommended by computer professionals to check ram of computers. It has also be burned to CD and run during system start.

The tool that does this is called Crucial System Scanner (via Shellcity) which is a tool that can give you the information for a safe computer memory upgrade. It is however deeply connected with the Crucial store which sells computer memory.

When you start the tool it opens a website in your default web browser that is showing you your computer’s specifications.

It displays the number of RAM banks, the banks that already contain computer memory but more importantly than that the supported DRAM Types, the computer memory frequencies and the maximum that can be installed on the computer. In my case it would be DDR2 SDRAM with PC”-5300, PC2-6400 and PC2-8500 frequencies and a maximum of 8192 Megabytes of computer memory.

If the software is not able to detect the information properly you could enter the motherboard information manually to receive the same kind of information for the computer memory upgrade. Oh, and you do not have to buy from their store obviously.