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Memturbo
by By Alan Lynn — NOCCC, edbytes@bigfoot.com - June 18, 2001 at 20:52:55:
Memturbo is a program that you, as a Windows user, need and you don’t even know it. Memory management or resource management was critical with DOS and it was common to run out of memory and resources with Windows 3.XX. Programs would take a piece of memory when they started and either would not release it when they closed or it would not be seen by Windows. The only cure was to restart Windows. That was of course solved when Windows 95 came along. Well, not really. Win 9X is better but it still uses many programs that are very similar to their 16-bit (Win 3.XX) versions. Here is an example; it can take several minutes after MS Word is closed before all the memory is returned for use.When you start Windows, you probably have a number of programs that start automatically. Even with cheap memory and larger than ever amounts of memory you can run out of resources. I have 128MB of RAM (this used to be a huge amount) and my machine can be down to 15 or 20 MB after boot up. You could go to the taskbar and close some programs, but the idea is that you want those programs. Also, even when the memory stabilizes it can be in a noncontiguous or fragmented state. Plain English, you have bits of memory in small pieces, which are not always useable by programs. This low or fragmented memory can make Windows unstable or cause Windows to use virtual memory. Virtual memory is your hard drive, which is much slower than RAM. So what do you do?
Memturbo by Silicon Prairie is an inexpensive program, only $19.95. It can be ordered on CD or downloaded. There is a free trial version at http://www.memturbo.com. This program has been working very well on my machines for many months. You get a little button in your tray telling you how much memory you have. You can set the amount you want to have as a minimum before autorecovery. There is also a timed autorecovery. You can quickly recover memory with a simple key combination, kind of like doing a save in word processing. You can tell it how high to go in recovery. This program watches your CPU usage and doesn’t come on when your CPU is very high (unless you want it to). When it recovers memory it also defragments your memory, which means it is useable by your programs. You can see a difference in performance after a recovery.
Memturbo works with Windows 95, 98 (SE and ME), NT 4, and 2000. Of course there are some features for Win 9X that NT with its different architecture doesn’t use. Memturbo doesn’t necessarily recover the most RAM of any of the RAM recovery programs, but it does its recovery without removing needed files such as dlls and kernel files. Your machine is more stable and often faster than it was before.
Memturbo http://memturbo.com $19.95 for download there is a shipping fee for CD. It is .a small program and easy to download.
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