memory

There’s a good little tutorial on How to Buy RAM for your PC at Amazon.com.

My computer has been misbehaving lately. It seems to be crashing constantly and the performance has been muddy. A few days ago I downloaded Cool Beans System Info, a nice little app that displays free RAM and processor usage. I realized that even though I have 256 MB of RAM, it seems like it’s all being used, all the time! It hovers around 80% if I have Outlook and IE running, and closing one or the other only brings me back to about 60%. Obviously there’s some leakage.
First I found MemTurbo. This little guy sits in your system tray and watches your RAM usage. If it dips below a certain level, the app tries to “scrub” your RAM to free what’s being wasted. It works pretty well, even with its odd DOS-looking progress bars. It’s shareware, though, and I doubt I’ll shell out the cash to keep it after it’s run through my free month (or 20 uses or whatever).
So then I looked around at NoNags and found RAMpage. This guy works just like MemTurbo, but it has the added bonus of being freeware. I’ve been using it for a few days and highly recommend it.
I also finally grabbed Microsoft’s TweakUI. If you haven’t downloaded this one yet, go grab it now. It lets you configure a slew of OS options that will make your computer so much nicer.

Wow! I can’t remember the last time I read something this scary.

Somehow I stumbled upon a very useful tutorial on how to name all of Shakespeare’s plays in under a minute.

You really should be reading Über each and every day. I can’t stress this enough. I’m not kidding. Seriously. I stopped reading for a few weeks and, man, I don’t want to tell you the things that started happening to me. It was bad. Real bad. But now I’m reading Über again and everything is better. So much better. I just feel more … complete. It’s like that feeling you get when you’ve lost something that was really important to you and then realize that it wasn’t lost, you had simply put it behind that other thing so you wouldn’t forget it when you got back from where you were going but since you had so much fun at that place you totally forgot about the thing that was oh-so-supposedly important to you and when you realized yesterday that you didn’t have it and went looking for it and couldn’t find it you freaked and then you spilled your drink on the counter next to that thing that you had balanced on top of the book that was near the box under which you had put that important thing so not only is it lost but now it’s got soda all over it and that is just wrong wrong wrong (why were you hiding it in the first place? you idiot.) so now you’re frustrated and cleaning the soda and you hate to move that box but now there’s going to be carbonated beverage stains all over it and the really old t-shirt that you really liked and had put in that damn box last week before you went to … and then you remember … the important thing is behind that other thing! … and then you get it and it’s got a little soda on it but otherwise it’s okay and man, don’t you feel better? That’s what reading Über every day is like. Kinda.

“It’s a type of brain dysfunction,” said Toshiyuki Sawaguchi, the university’s professor of neurobiology. “Young people today are becoming stupid.”

And … in a completely unrelated story … Doctors amputate first human hand transplant: Hallam said for the first year, the right hand - which had belonged to a French motorcyclist killed in an accident - had functioned well.
link via Harlan

Apparently he’s gotten a few complaints, but I happen to like the new direction Neale has taken with wrongwaygoback. Memories are the reasons we write, right? Go read some of his. You’ll be glad you did.