How can you determine which programs are hogging this precious memory and bogging you down, often causing a slow and unresponsive system? Some are chugging away in the background without you even knowing about it!

Windows has a very useful little application called the “Task Manager”, which pops up a little window on demand, showing you just this! Here’s how you can use it to your advantage.

Right click on an empty area in the task bar at the bottom of your screen and select Task Manager from the menu that pops up:

The Task Manager will open.

Now click on the tab labeled “Processes”:

This shows a list of all task running, but you want to be able to see which are using the most of your precious memory (RAM).

So click on the heading of the right hand column where it says “Mem Usage”. Click right on those words – now do it a second time! You’ll see that the tasks running are now nicely sorted with the most memory-intensive ones at the top of the list:

This gives you a better idea of what may be using large chunks of memory without you even being aware of it.  In the above example, the Carbonite online backup program is currently doing a backup and hogging lots of memory. One can easily just open Carbonite and pause it to free up that memory if required.

Try this out and see what is running and what is using memory. If you are not sure what the Processes in that list do, simply Google them and you’ll be able to read that up.

We’ll be talking about some Outlook hassles and how the Task Manager can help you solve them in a future post!

I am here to tell you that when you are buying a new computer or looking to upgrade or speed up an old computer, you need to place the most emphasis on the amount of RAM (computer memory) in the system. If you follow this simple instruction you will end up with a computer that runs faster and better than ever.

Let’s consider a simple story to understand the logic behind this statement: Bob and John are both incredibly smart engineers with the same level of intelligence. They are both equally capable of solving a given problem. Bob has the gift of being able to process data very quickly, however, he has a small brain that can only handle a limited amount of data at any given point in time. John on the other hand processes data a little slower than Bob, however, his brain capacity is extremely large. In other words he can process a lot more data at any given moment in time.

Throw the same problem at both of them. One that entails a lot of data processing. Who do you think will solve the problem faster? You guessed it – John is going to have an easier time as he can process and store a lot more data at any specific moment in time. So while Bob is working hard to transfer the data in and out of his brain, John handles it more efficiently and more than makes up for the slightly slower processing time.

Your computer works exactly the same way. If you have a lot of RAM, i.e. A larger brain capacity, it will thank you each and every time it is processing data or solving problems. Problem solving or “grinding” is when computers tend to slow down in the first place.

So the next time you are trying to decide between spending the money on extra RAM or a faster processor, go for the extra RAM and look forward to a faster and more efficient computer.