memorial

Reclaim your RAM

Even in these days of cheap RAM, where you can get an extra gigabyte of the stuff for around $40 or so, there's not much you can do about must-have programs that leak memory short of seeking out an alternative. That doesn't mean you're tied to incessant program restarts and operating system reboots, though: a few useful programs such as RAM Idle LE, RAMBooster, and Instant Memory Cleaner make it their business to reclaim wasted bits.

RAMBooster is well-known to longtime Daily Download readers. We've featured it in our Windows Starter Kit and in a First … Read more

After 38 years, a new type of memory to hit market

It's been a long haul for phase change memory, but the goal is in sight.

Numonyx, the memory joint venture between STMicroelectronics and Intel, is already shipping samples of phase change memory (PCM) chips to customers and will start shipping PCM chips commercially later this year, CEO Brian Harrison said at a press conference Monday.

"We expect to bring it to market this year and generate some revenue," Harrison said. "It is one to two years before it becomes widely commercially available."

Hearing a CEO talk about existing samples and near-term commercial shipments is a … Read more

Intel, STMicro ready to launch Numonyx

The offspring of Intel and STMicroelectronics, Numonyx, is ready to open its doors amid a volatile market for its flash-memory chips.

Numonyx is the combination of Intel's NOR flash memory business and STMicro's NAND business, which will make it the largest provider of NOR flash memory in the world and the largest flash supplier to the mobile phone market, said Brian Harrison, the former head of Intel's flash memory group and the new CEO of Numonyx. "We have a very broad product line that's not typical of a start-up company by any means," he … Read more

Dell refutes solid state drive failure claims

Dell is refuting a report by Avian Securities claiming return rates for solid state drives (SSDs) are high due to performance issues and failures.

"The recently published analyst report estimating a high return rate for Solid State Drive technology (SSD) in Dell products is unfounded and wholly inaccurate," Dell said Tuesday. The Avian Securities report had stated that "failure rates for SSDs are running a full order of magnitude higher than that of disk drives."

Dell disagrees. "Our global data on SSDs (to date) shows reliability rates that are equal to or better than HDD … Read more

Web code locks up iPhones and iPod Touch

A new exploit will either lock up your iPhone or iPod Touch or crash your Safari browser on your PC or Mac OS desktop if you simply visit a maliciously coded Web site. Unlike an earlier exploit that required users to click to become infected, the new code published by iPhoneWorld requires no user interaction.

So far, Apple has had no comment.

The code was first reported in January and exhausts the memory in Safari, which in turn will cause your iPhone or iPod Touch to freeze, or your desktop Safari to crash. "Given the nature of this issue,&… Read more

MacBook Air rivals, past and present

The MacBook Air focused global attention--for the first time with prolonged intensity--on a small, thin notebook. Until now, this kind of design simply wasn't on many users' shopping lists. (Particularly Americans who choose performance over portability.) Here's a brief look at this notebook category, both past and present.

A few prefatory notes: Because I use a MacBook Air, the topic of ultraportables has taken on more importance for me. But the impact of this category of notebooks goes much further than personal interest. Ultraportables now contain fast Core 2 Duo processors, snappy solid state drives (SSDs), and better … Read more

Shed wasted space with Xslimmer

If you spend a bit of time searching the Download.com Mac catalog, you might notice a lot of applications that seem identical. These are separate installers for the same programs, but one is for a Mac with an Intel processor, and the other is for a PowerPC chip. Not every program has separate installers, though, and once you've got your program up and running that can lead to a lot of wasted space.

Xslimmer is an effective shareware tool that costs a lot less than buying an brand-new hard drive, even at the plummeting cost of memory. For … Read more

Apple holding back on flash memory purchases?

As if things weren't bad enough for flash memory companies this year, they're now even more concerned since Apple has yet to place a major order in 2008, according to a report out of Taiwan.

Digitimes hasn't always been the most reliable source, but they have gotten enough things right lately to take notice, and their report Tuesday suggesting that Apple's flash memory orders have fallen off the face of the Earth jives with other information we've seen this year. According to Digitimes' sources in the Taiwanese flash memory industry, Apple has yet to place … Read more

A flash memory notebook: The sounds of silence

Do you want to know the best thing about a notebook with a flash memory drive, rather than a conventional hard drive?

It's the silence.

The notebook I'm testing--a Dell Latitude D830 with a 64GB flash hard drive from Samsung--hasn't emitted a sound in three days. Flash drives, which store data in NAND flash memory, don't require motors or spinning platters. Thus, there are no whirring mechanical noises.

Compare that with my T42 ThinkPad. It sounds like a guinea pig got trapped inside, particularly during the start-up phase. Vzoooot. Cronk, cronk, cronk. Zip, zip. (Pause.) Gurlagurlagurla...… Read more

Intel cutting margin expectations on soft flash prices

Updated March 5 at 5:40 p.m. PT to clarify paragraph on Intel's flash business.

Intel's profits will fade a bit in the first quarter as the company bears the brunt of falling flash memory prices.

The company announced late on Monday that it was reducing its expectations for gross margin from 56 percent to 54 percent "due to lower than expected prices for NAND flash memory chips." In a way, it's a narrowing of Intel's forecast, since the previous expectations came with a "plus or minus a couple of points" … Read more