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:
http://www.memturbo.com.


About the Author
Robin Nobles, Director of Training, Academy of Web Specialists,
(http://www.academywebspecialists.com) has trained several
thousand people in her online search engine marketing courses
(http://www.onlinewebtraining.com). She also teaches 3-day hands on search engine
marketing workshops in locations across the globe with Search
Engine Workshops(http://www.searchengineworkshops.com).

Copyright 2002 Robin Nobles. All rights reserved.