RAM costs money

Well, our laptops are complaining now. At least the cheap ones. In our eagerness to create the perfect "walled garden" for our children to play on, and try out all the variations of Internet Safey filtering and blocking, somehow the RAM (physical memory of the computer) got used up. So things are slllooowww.

It's not too difficult to spot the culprits, turn things off, and optimize the performance, but I don't really have the time - at least to keep on top of this each week. I'm not a LAN administrator, but a DAD administrator - there's ant colonies to be destroyed, piano lessons to be taught, and cars to be washed.

So, my unofficial guideline is this: for each user ID on the computer, allocate about 50 Megabytes worth of memory that'll be consumed (this isn't too scientific, so check it out yourself). The laptop I'm typing on now....has ContentWatch, Registry Aid, Ad-aware, and some other things running, as processes for each User ID logged in and active. I've got 4 User IDs active at times, ergo my 250 M total RAM for the computer gets really thin, really fast. Especially cutting and pasting large graphics, like the Kindergartners like to do.

Time to just get more RAM, if I'm serious about Internet Safety. Another 500 M should do nicely (at about $40 a pop!). Plop it in, be safe and fast.