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?

Several third party applications tried to provide affected Firefox users with a solution to reduce the memory usage of the browser. Firefox Plumber is the last program to go down that route.

So how does it work? The developers are not explaining the inner workings of their program, only that they tweaked the memory handling. When you run Firefox Plumber you will notice a sharp drop in memory usage, usually down to a few thousand Kilobytes the most.

You will notice that the memory usage will climb up again and gets dropped again to the lowest possible amount from where it starts climbing up again. The memory usage won’t climb higher than a few thousand Kilobytes the most at any point in time though.

While it is not clear how the program does its magic, it is likely that it moves the memory to the disk cache. While that drops the memory usage, it also could slow down operations due to the slower speed of the hard drive in comparison to the computer’s RAM. It still can be beneficial if the computer has little RAM installed. The process does not seem to have an effect on the computer’s cpu usage though. At least on my modern PC I was not able to come to the conclusion that running the program did not affect the cpu usage.

When you close Firefox Plumber you will notice that memory usage increases gradually until it reaches the usual levels. The program comes with a configuration file in the program directory that lists the processes that it optimizes. Included by default are firefox.exe, plugin-container.exe and palemoon.exe. I did not try adding additional processes, Thunderbird comes to mind, to the ini but it could theoretically work.

Firefox users who want to reduce the browser’s memory usage can download Firefox Plumber from the developer website.

What they’ve done is built a prosthetic chip that uses electrodes to expand and enhance the rat’s memory abilities. After studying chemical interactions that allow short-term learning and memorization they believed they had an idea how to make it work, and they’ve done it. The chip can receive and store neural signals. This allows rats to store what they learn in the devices and as a result, allows them to learn more and to remember it forever.

Dr. Bergers’s description of their success is exciting and, to be frank, maybe a little terrifying:
“Flip the switch on, and the rats remember. Flip it off, and the rats forget [...] These integrated experimental modeling studies show for the first time that with sufficient information about the neural coding of memories, a neural prosthesis capable of real-time identification and manipulation of the encoding process can restore and even enhance cognitive mnemonic processes.”

The implication of such technology is simply staggering. Imagine what this could mean for people with learning disabilities. Think of what it would mean for people affected by Alzheimer’s. The series of experiments being conducted by Dr. Berger’s team are, in a paper, being called “A Cortical Neural Prosthesis for Restoring and Enhancing Memory”. Currently the trials are working on the next step of development, reproducing the same results in monkeys.

It can’t be emphasized enough the astounding positive applications of technology such as this. On the other hand, humanity has a history of twisting profound discoveries into malicious applications (hello, Atom Bomb). If the potential in this technology could be realized for positive applications, the same must be said for its potential for abuse. Think about it, turn it on and it works, turn it off and they forget. I can see it now! Military applications alone would be a frightening thing.

Still, in a world where we see so much suffering, this development by Dr. Berger and his diligent team is surely something worth getting excited about. Treatments for malicious, memory fogging diseases, cognitive issues and more could be possible.
With refinement, it might even change the very face of education. Need to learn a language? No more DVD’s and headphones, folks, you can just download the Portuguese app and be on your way! Ah yes, the possibilities are endless and we’ve got stars in our eyes, waiting to see how this development progresses. You can read more at the source, or download the research paper until July 17 from here.

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.

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.

The developers of the application have released the software, or more precisely the source code, that they have created for their research paper which can be freely downloaded from the project’s website. Available are the tools to create an image of the system memory, the automatic key finding applications and a program for error-correction for AES key schedules.

Two memory imaging tools (USB / PXE Imaging Tools and EFI Netboot Imaging Tools) and Automatic key-finding (AESKeyFinder and RSAKeyFinder) are available on the website.

The research paper can also be downloaded from the website along with frequently asked questions.

Update: The research papers and source code are no longer available on the University website. It is not clear why they have been removed but the pages return a 404 not found error when they are opened in a web browser.

Update 2: The research paper and source code is still available. The university made the decision to change the url structure of their website without adding proper redirects to avoid inaccessible pages because of links still pointing to the old destination pages. You can access the research paper on Cold Boot Attacks on encryption keys here.

The page links to the full research paper in pdf format, the introductory blog post, frequently asked questions, the experiment guide, source code, and videos and images.

Especially the images and videos can be handy to get a quick understanding of how disk encryption can be defeated with the technology.

His application recorded the memory usage of the browser every three seconds over a period of three hours each and the graphs show clearly that there does not seem to be an end to Safari’s memory hunger. In the end Safari was using more than 630 Megabytes of RAM compared to 111 Megabytes for Firefox 3, 191 Megabytes for Flock, 190 Megabytes for Opera and 194 Megabytes for Internet Explorer 8.

The conclusion of the author is that “Safari on Windows shows extremely poor memory management [..] certainly a design that looks inefficient and seems to contradict Apple’s marketing”.

Firefox 3 on the other hand seems to have memory efficiency written all over its face.

It was an old computer, an AMD Duron 800 Mhz with a 40 Gigabyte hard drive, 256 Megabytes of RAM running Windows XP. The first thing I did was to lookup the Stop error message that was showing when the bluescreen appeared only to find out that it was most likely a hardware related problem.

My guess was that it was either the motherboard, the RAM or the hard drive that were leading to the bluescreen so I had to test them to find the cause for it. Oh, before I started I made sure that every piece of hardware that was not needed to run the computer was disconnected, like sound and network adapters but also secondary drives and onboard components.

The only way to do this was to burn a copy of the Ultimate Boot CD which contains tools to analyze the hardware and boot it. The disc contains all kinds of utilities to scan, analyze and repair hardware connected to a computer and it is especially effective when it comes to RAM and hard drives.

I decided to run Memtest to test the RAM of the computer which turned out to be fine. The next tool was the Drive Fitness Test designed for IBM and Hitachi hard drives. It turned out that the hard drive had damaged sectors which the tool was able to repair.

With the errors corrected I tried to boot into Windows again and it happened to load just fine. If that would not have helped I would have tried some additional tools to test the CPU for instance. I would have used the cloning tool to clone the hard drive and format it completely to start the installation a new.

The Ultimate Boot CD is an excellent utility if you want to test major PC components without having to install software on the computer.

The capacity of the usb drive is shown on the surface of the usb drive making it very easy to monitor the available storage capacity of the usb drive. I only got an usb drive that is not showing it’s available capacity making it hard to judge if the free space on the device is sufficient to copy all the needed files on it.

The capacity is shown on a ten bar capacity meter which equals the storage capacity percentage of the drive. The available storage is displayed even if the usb drive is not connected to a computer. The usb drives come with a capacity of either one or two gigabytes and look very stylish.

Read More:

Lexarmedia Jumpdrive Mercury

While I did not conduct any tests I have the feeling that everything is running just a bit more fluent, a tad faster with less activity on my hard drives. I had a lot of hard drive activity for instance when Newsbin was loading the headers of a popular newsgroup which seemed to have been reduced quite a bit by the increase in RAM.

It should also have a impact on games for instance. I don’t play games at the moment except for CIV IV which is an excellent game but not a resource hungry one. It seems to run a bit faster but I could not see a big change here. It will become more obvious when I start playing games like Hellgate London for instance.

I’m running XP which does not need that much RAM. If I would be running Vista instead I would probably see a big increase in performance though. I sometimes have to work with large videos and a short test has shown that the video editing application uses the additional Gigabyte well.

So, yes it is faster. Yes it reduces load on the hard drives. Yes it is totally worth it. At least for me.

One convenient way to setup a Ramdisk is to use the software AR Ramdisk which is easy to setup and work with. Just install AR Ramdisk as usual and start configuring the settings afterwards. Assign a drive letter to the Ramdisk and choose a size for it. I would not suggest to select more than a quarter of your Ram but you can experiment with the settings if you like. Leave everything as is and restart your computer afterwards. You should see a new drive letter after the restart, now copy files or applications to the Ramdisk and start them from there.

You will see a noticeable speed increase when running applications from the Ramdisk. A good website to get some portable applications is the portable apps website which has downloads for programs like Firefox, Thunderbird and many others.

It is also possible to use the Ramdisk for the temp files of Windows. To do that you need to move the Temp directory from the default location to the Ramdisk. To change the default location go to Control Panel -> System -> Advanced -> Environment Variables and change the Windows temp dir to the Ramdisk.

It should be noted that all data that is in the Ramdisk will be lost if you restart the computer. Remember that the files reside in system Ram. This is great for temp files which means that you do not have to delete the temp files by yourself. It could also be used to set the disk cache of Firefox to the Ramdisk which would mean that it would be automatically cleared during shutdown.

It seems that my assumption was wrong. Firefox saves the last 50 visited websites of a single session in memory which means that it could add up quickly if you visit lots of content filled websites. The reason behind this is that it is faster to access a already visited website if it still resides in memory instead of loading it from disk cache or from the server.

50 sites on the other hand seems a lot to me. I usually do not visit sites again that I visited a while ago – I tend to visit many different sites and only a few ones more than once daily. The fix is relatively simple. Type about:config in the Firefox address bar and search for the term:

browser.sessionhistory.max_entries

Right-click the entry, select modify from the list and change it to a lower value. I set it to 5 which works well for my surfing habits. Other values might be better for yours.

source: A2Z

A great selection that has its price, nevertheless the components that are used can be replaced by others and the steps to build the personal computer remain the same. Everything is explained in detail with lots of screenshots to aid the explanation. The next five steps guide you through the intital preperation process: Preparing the Case, installing power supply, cpu, memory, motherboard and heat sink. Those are the most difficult steps for inexperienced users. Can be tricky but the guide is excellent and should be sufficient for everyone.

After the first phase the guide explains who to assemble the motherboard into the case and to install the sound card, optical drives, hard drives and overall cable management for better airflow. The final phase guides you through bios configuration, loading and configuring windows and installing drivers for the components.

Take a look if you plan to build your next pc.

[tags]personal computer, build pc, motherboard, cpu, athlon, heatsink, bios configuration[/tags]

Config Inspector is a nice little freeware application for windows operating systems that could be described as an advanced task manager. Besides offering more information about loaded applications and processes it also displays vital information about memory and cpu usage, network utilization and general windows information.

A nice handy utility which is only 125K zipped. Just unpack and run, no installation required.

ConfigInspector: The Next Generation of Windows Task Manager

For the average user, Windows Task Manager probably doesn’t come into play very much at all, though this is just a guess. Users who are more particular and curious from moderate to advanced abilities are definitely familiar with Task Manager. It is a go-to for controlling application usage, active process identification, observation of services and performance and CPU usage among other things. From the Task Manager, the user is able to terminate processes and applications that are unnecessary or interfering with other applications.

ConfigInspector is a free utility that displays the most pertinent information about your operating system. It is like Task Manager on steroids. For the user who utilizes Windows Task Manager regularly, this is a must-have utility. It is more precise than Task Manager and offers more features, yet you still have the control that you normally would, if not more. The specific features that it offers, as per the specs, are as follows:

Displays list of working applications;
Displays list of working processes;
Monitors the memory status;
Monitors the CPU and network utilization;
Displays the full list of CPU capabilities;
Displays important Windows OS parameters;
Displays Windows Network parameters;
Displays HDD status and information;
Displays videocard information;
Displays soundcard information;
ConfigInspector works under Windows 2000/XP/2003 only.

The last part is interesting. “ConfigInspector works under Windows 2000/ XP/2003 only. It works under Windows 7 as well. Perhaps that is because many XP applications are compatible with Windows 7. There is no mention of Vista compatibility at the download site. To examine the capabilities of ConfigInspector, download the .zip free version from this link.

Double-click the .exe file to extract and ConfigInspector opens immediately without any installation. It is a stand-alone utility that can be turned on and off as needed, though it would be reasonable to assume that the advanced user would use it on a regular basis and perhaps leave Windows Task Manager aside.
For example, here is a screenshot of the CPU usage monitor:

There is a constant and indelibly accurate readout of CPU Load and Kernel Usage. Load is indicated by the green line and Kernel is indicated by the red. You will see rapid and continuous fluctuations every second. This CPU is running 12 applications at once, so it is interesting to see the activity.

Specific activity can be identified with ConfigInspector for Applications, Processes, CPU Usage, Memory, Network Utilization, CPU, Windows, Machine, Display, Media, Network and IDE/Drives. All of these are tabs in the utility and each can be appropriately manipulated as needed. The following screenshot shows the Memory tab:

It is visible, right down to the exact number of bytes, how the memory is allocated. This is definitely a pristine diagnostic tool. As stated, the PC used in the demonstration is running 12 applications so there is a great deal of activity and only 16% of the Physical Memory is free at the time of the screenshot.

Much can be ascertained and controlled with this utility and it is certainly worth taking for a test drive. In terms of memory, it only occupies 125KB, so there is nothing to lose – just much to see.