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Do you want more speed in your computer? Is your memory not optimized to make your computer run it's fastest? MagnaRam 97 by Quarterdeck can do just that and even more. |
| Quarterdeck has a great line of caching and memory compression
utilities such as QEMM and SpeedyRom. MagnaRam lives up to Quarterdeck's
reputation of great quality software that works.
I reviewed this software on an AMD 486 133mhz computer running Windows 95 with 32 MB of ram, a 407 MB hard drive, SVGA, a sound card, modem, and cd-rom. This is a great computer for running applications like this but the minimum requirements are a 386 with 8 MB of ram and Windows 3.1 with at least 4 MB of free disk space. Sorry Windows NT users, I don't think it will run on NT. This utility comes on two 3.5 inch 1.44 MB floppies. Not having a lot of free disk space on my computer, I liked how compact the program is. But despite it's very small hard drive requirements it is a very powerful program. It also has some very good documentation. The documentation gave me a very good idea of what to expect after installation. The only questions I had left was how it was going to do on my computer. The MagnaRam documentation told me to defragment my hard drive and enable virtual memory. It went in very elaborately how to do this, in both Windows 3.1 and 95. After doing that I was finally ready to install it. I stuck the first floppy in the drive and hit the install icon. It asked me for registration information and where to put it and started installing it. It went faster than I thought it would. It copied the files and then edited the right files, asked me if I wanted to read the readme file, and if I wanted to reboot now or later. It was very simple to install for a very powerful program. MagnaRam has great displays about what it has done on your computer and all the memory management that it has given you, as well as show you how your memory is setup and placed. It has great graphics to show you what is has done and is doing at that second. It is also nice to see in other applications that you have 42 MB of memory instead of 32 MB thanks to compression. I did notice in the program that it did load some of my programs faster. Netscape loaded a total 10 seconds faster. Internet Explorer also did pretty well. America Online loaded noticeably faster too. But despite all these great stories one or two of my programs loaded a little bit slower. At first my hard drive caching was going really slow. But after I used a tip from Wintune, courtesy of the Windows Magazine website (located at www.winmag.com), my hard drive cache was going just as fast as before. Some of my graphics were going a tad bit slower, but only noticeable to a heavy graphics user. It took Netscape a longer time to load the web pages in my browser than it usually did and some of my other applications were a little slower loading documents as well as loading themselves. I tried uninstalling it and the uninstallation was very smooth. It gave me the usual prompt asking if I was sure and then it automatically uninstalled everything. I was surprised that I didn't have to reboot like when I installed it and changed some buffer sizes. I could still work without rebooting and that saved me some time while I was going to work on other programs. To find out more information about MagnaRam 97 you can visit the Quarterdeck website at www.quarterdeck.com. You can also go to the PC World website and many other magazine websites to find out their opinions and tests on this utility.
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