Open two tabs in your browser with separate websites on them, like on one and your email service on the other. You can also see this happening in real-time, here is what you need to do: On Mac OS X you can press Command + Shift + Escape to open “Activity Monitor” and see the RAM usage in the “Memory” section.

You can press Ctrl + Shift + Esc keys in Windows to bring up the Task Manager and move to the “Performance” tab to see all the details regarding RAM. When you use your PC, the operating system is continuously moving less important processes (passive ones) to virtual RAM (slower memory), and freeing up actual RAM (faster memory) for important processes (active ones).Īdditionally, your OS also caches less important processes to free up RAM for essential operations.

Virtual RAM is the one typically stored in a file in your system drive it’s called pagefile.sys in Windows and swapfile in Mac OS X. On the other hand, hard drive storage is very slow, so the passive processes are moved there to keep more RAM free to tackle more important or pressing processes. Physical RAM is high-speed, so all active processes are written there.

Operating systems use both the RAM and storage inside your hard drive to write and exchange processes.Īlmost all the latest operating systems (released in the last ten years) have a smart RAM management system to cache processes and take full advantage of the physical RAM and the virtual RAM stored in the hard drive storage. In this article, I will try to clear up misconceptions about RAM cleaning tools.

Well, there are loads of debates going on around RAM cleaning/optimizing tools, both in favor and against. Have you ever wondered how the cleaning and quickly boosts in RAM work? How do these tools free up RAM? Do they allocate the processes somewhere else or kill the processes? Or do they just fake it? If you don’t have 'enough' RAM in your PC, then you must have tried (or thought of trying) a RAM cleaning tool that promises to quickly 'free up' RAM.

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