How Do I Download More Ram

Of course, the best way of increasing your video RAM is to buy a new graphics card. If your dedicated GPU is outdated or you’re still relying on your integrated graphics card, upgrading to a new GPU model will give a huge boost to the overall performance (if you have CPU and RAM good enough to sustain the growth). Installing RAM on these risers, with the parts removed, was more clear and more easy to photograph and the fundamentals are exactly the same of installing in a PC mainboard. Just remember your PC may look more similar to the first examples, rather than this one. Most desktop and some laptops have free slots, which you can use to increase RAM in your Windows PC. However, even though it’s much cheaper than it used to be, adding more RAM is still a relatively costly solution. It’s much less expensive and makes more sense to free up the RAM you already have than to add more. Why free up RAM?

A software developer asked me about a website called Download More RAM. I don’t think he heard my other coworkers snicker. He asked if it was a security issue, while missing the even more important question: Can you download RAM? I said it’s best not to visit the site, and spared him the history lesson.

Downloading RAM isn’t possible because RAM is physical hardware–computer chips on a circuit board. You can only download software. But still, the sites remain.

The origins are credited to a 2004 post in a discussion forum–a Mac forum, appropriately, and I’ll have more on that in a second–where someone asked how to download more RAM and apparently he was serious.

Can you actually download more RAM?

Since the question has come up, I’ll answer it. You cannot actually download RAM, just like you can’t download a second monitor. Or a newer CPU, or more GHz for your CPU. Or a million dollars.

RAM chips are a physical thing–silicon chips that store information and allow a CPU to store and retrieve it very quickly. And no, there aren’t any extra RAM chips in your computer waiting for some secret code to wake them up.

If you need more RAM, you need to buy some and plug it into your computer. Not visit some dodgy web site. For general computer use, I recommend 8-16 GB of RAM.

The concept of “Soft” RAM

I say it’s appropriate that this question first appeared in a Mac forum because in the 1990s there was a software product called RAM Doubler, produced by Connectix, originally for the Mac. You couldn’t download it. It cost around $50 back when retail stores still sold software. It used some of your memory to compress data that would otherwise be swapped out to the hard drive, under the theory that it was faster to compress and decompress to RAM than to swap from disk. The product did actually work to a degree. But when people bought half as much RAM as they knew they needed and counted on RAM Doubler to make up the difference, it usually didn’t work out too well for them. Tragically, it worked best for the people who needed it the least.

The product sold well, though. That led to Connectix developing a similar product for Windows. And Syncronys marketed a program called SoftRAM that claimed to do the same thing, but the Syncronys product, it turned out, didn’t actually even try to compress RAM. When word got out about the Syncronys fraud, it pretty much destroyed the product category. Connectix went on to develop a number of very successful emulation and virtualization products. Syncronys went out of business.

RAM isn't something you download, it's a memory chip inside of your computer (RAM stands for Random Access Memory). It's use to store information that your processor needs to access constantly so it doesn't have to keep fetching it from your hard drive. The only way to add more RAM is to buy more and install it.

How To Download More Ram On Your Computer

“Soft” memory today

The idea hasn’t completely gone away though. Linux has the built-in ability to compress memory, and some Android phones use it. Quietly. Windows 10 has the ability to compress memory too, but Microsoft doesn’t talk a lot about it. Basically, the issue all along has been that memory compression is faster than swapping out to disk, but it will slow you down if you’re doing it constantly. And if you’re doing it constantly, it’s one more thing that can go wrong, which was what my Mac users from the previous century taught me the hard way.

But that feature, if you have it, is part of the operating system. You’re not actually downloading more RAM. It’s reaching a bit to call the downloadmoreram.com website a scam, since they’re not charging you anything (though I bet their ad revenue is non-trivial). Downloadable RAM is definitely a meme or joke for people who understand computer hardware to play on people who don’t.

Is downloadmoreram.com safe? A scam? A joke?

Is it a security issue? Not intentionally. The guy who created the site did it to be funny. But due to the site’s popularity I would imagine it’s an attractive target. If someone were to get into the site and inject a little extra into his downloadable code, they’d spread pretty far. That’s called a watering hole attack.

And running strange code you got off web sites that make too-good-to-be-true claims is a good way to get into trouble. You miss some jokes that way, but you also miss computer repairs that way. Malware is nastier than ever, so I’m fine with missing some jokes. I recommend you do the same. And it’s not like the joke is all that funny anyway.

Rule #1 of security, going back to the 1980s, was to not run something if it claimed to do the impossible. It’s best if we continue to follow that rule.

Is downloadmoreram a scam? Legally probably not, since they don’t actually take anything from you. A waste of time, sure.

What does downloadmoreram.com do if you can’t download RAM?

I visited downloadmoreram.com so you don’t have to. I did it in the only safe possible way to visit dodgy web sites that make impossible claims. I used a freshly installed computer on an isolated network, then I wiped and reinstalled the machine.

You make your selection of how much RAM you want to download, and then it rickrolls you. If you’re not familiar with rickrolling, it’s an old joke of making people unintentionally listen to the 1987 pop song “Never Gonna Give You Up” by Rick Astley.

If you visited the site and now you’re here because it didn’t work, that’s why. The site doesn’t exist to help you, it exists to see how many people it can fool every day. Downloadmoreram isn’t really a scam. It’s a series of worn-out jokes run by a guy who likes to feel superior to people who don’t know as much about computers as he does.

Unlocking disabled computer capacity

One of the reasons people believe it might be possible to download RAM is because some types of computer chips ship with disabled capabilities. And in rare cases, it’s possible to unlock those capabilities. But it’s far from universal, and RAM chips don’t work like that.