RAMBooster Video

RAMBooster Video Transcript

[ Music ] ^M00:00:02

>> I'm Jessica Dolcourt with Cnet download.com, with a first look at RAM Booster. RAM Booster is the tiny, well-known, freebie utility that lends a hand by, well, boosting the amount of your computer's available RAM. I know, who would've thought. Let's take a peek. If all you do is leave it running, RAM Booster monitors your available memory and CPU usage. But tweak the optimization settings and then it also frees up RAM so you can run more programs and speed your system. First decide if you want to use RAM Booster occasionally, meaning that you manually optimize your computer, or if you want to set it to auto optimize under certain performance conditions. You'll still defined settings either way you go. But with one slight difference. Checking the box to activate auto optimizing. You can also click an option to launch RAM Booster when your computer starts up and another to keep it minimized the task tray. The other values in the options menu are a little confusing if you're not sure what these fields are for or what the RAM values mean. That's when the program is decent but still slightly vague help files kick in to explain each feature and recommends settings based on your total RAM. Parameters define how much RAM you want to try to free each time RAM Booster runs. And if you want to make that contingent upon the CPU usage. It will also include refresh details. The other menu options minimal. Extras just creates a shortcut. A little misleading. On the interface optimizes is the button you click if you hadn't enabled the auto optimizing and wanted to free RAM on a case-by-case basis. Toggle mode reduces the window to a third of its size, so it just displays free RAM in the CPU drain. Clicking anywhere on the grey panel brings it back. You can get it smaller by minimizing RAM Booster to the system tray and right-clicking to select or deselect many settings. Hover and you can see how much free RAM you have in megabytes. RAM Booster hasn't had an update since 2005 and visually it's not very Web 2.0. Plus there's my personal pet peeve. Watch what happens when you click another window. Nothing. You have to actually minimize the pane to hide it. However it's a very useful utility especially for Windows XP users, and when used right it can liberate a large chunk of RAM. All of us here highly recommend it. I'm Jessica Dolcourt and you've been looking at Ram Booster. ^M00:02:12 [ music ]