Gauge how much memory you really have

By: DON EDRINGTON - For the North County Times

Rarely does a week pass that I don't get an e-mail from someone saying an error message tells him he has "insufficient memory," whereupon he tells me he has free hard disk space of, say, 20GB. Shouldn't that be plenty of spare memory?

Well, the message refers to available RAM (random access memory) rather than the amount of free storage space on his C-drive.

Most Windows-based computers will run on 128MG of RAM, but really should have 256MG to work at peak efficiency. The additional 128MG can be purchased and user-installed ---- but I prefer having it installed by a technician at an established computer store or service center. Additional RAM is not expensive ---- and will make most PCs run faster and more efficiently.

To see how much RAM you have, click on Start>Help & Support and type "RAM" into the Search box.

To check your free hard-disk space, double-click My Computer and then right-click the C-drive icon. Click Properties to see the ratio of used/free disk space. The mammoth sizes of today's hard drives give many of us all the storage space we will ever need, unless we tend to fill it up with tons of graphic and/or media files.

While in Properties, you can click on Tools and perform important hard-drive maintenance for pre-WinXP computers by choosing ScanDisk and Defrag; or by choosing Defrag and Check Disk on XP machines. If these programs get hung up in any way, additional "run" options can be found at www.pcdon.com.

Another frequent question is "Can I recover a file that crashed, but which I had not saved?" Well, unless an automatic backup option had been established within the program, the answer is normally no. MSWord users can find these choices by going to Tools>Options>Save.

Many folks will type a lengthy e-mail message, but lose it if the e-mail program suddenly crashes. Outlook Express users can protect against this by doing a periodic Ctrl+S (Save) which will place a copy of the current message in their Drafts folder. This copy will be automatically deleted after the completed message is sent.

AOL/CompuServe users can go to File>Save As and keep a newly-typed message as an HTML or as a plain text file, by giving the message a name and location. However, I can find no way outgoing Juno messages can be saved while being typed.

In any case, the best way to save any new e-mail message is to create it off-line in your favorite word processor, followed by saving it and copying and pasting it into your e-mail client's outgoing message box.

Even this method, however, is not fool-proof if the backup copy is deleted or over-written. Those who are serious about backing up any kind of lengthy document will give its copies periodic incremental names, such as Message-1, Message-2, etc. By the time the document is completed as, say Message-10, the preceding nine versions will still be in place as extra insurance.

More tips can be found at www.pcdon.com and calls are welcome at (949) 646-8615.

From: http://www.nctimes.com/articles/2004/04/04/news/
columnists/computer_tutor_don/4_3_0420_38_58.txt