Ram Doubler
Review

Ram Doubler
Company: Connetix
Estimated Price: $55.00

By now, everyone and their sister has heard about Ram Doubler 2.0. Not only does this latest version of the top selling memory enhancer double your memory, but it will also triple it. Sounds all well and good, but does it work? Are there any ill effects by using it? For a month now, I have had it loaded on my Macintosh, and a few things become clear.

First, it works. You can indeed set your pseudo memory to three time that of actual RAM installed. To do this, you go to your control panel’s folder, where, unlike version 1.x, you now have control over Ram Doubler. Simply set the slide ruler to you desired memory, and restart. You Mac now thinks it has that much more memory! (See picture below)

Yes, it works. But in the real world, the world YOU live and compute in, it must be known if it goes beyond simply working to also include peacefully coexisting with all the other programs you use everyday. And it is here that I found many a problem.

There is nothing more dreadful than to be right in the middle of a project, and have your Mac crash on you. Sure, you have been saving as you went along (haven’t you?), but you will still lose all that you did since that last save. After installing Ram Doubler 2.0, my Mac would crash much more often than before installation. No, there is no foolproof test to find out just WHAT caused your crash, but I use this simple rule: if I take something out of the system, and the crashing goes away, I blame that program. This rule works for me, and it also tells me that, while I like some of the benefits Ram Doubler provides, it causes too many crashes. Too many, for any person needing to get work done on a timely basis. [Tim, crashes even after upgrading to 7.5.5?]

I could list here which programs would not coexist with Ram Doubler 2.0, but I want to keep this issue under 10 Mbytes. Suffice it to say, MANY programs would lock up my computer when Ram Doubler was on. The top crash victims include Adobe Photoshop 3.0.3, Netscape Navigator 2.2 and 3.0. (Of course, those are both buggy even WITHOUT Ram Doubler installed!) America Online 2.7, and ClarisWorks 4.0v4. Many other programs became unstable as well, but these were the most troublesome. However, most (though not all) my problems went away when Ram Doubler did. You figure it out.

My recommendation would be to hold off buying 2.0, and wait until Connectix has a few updates under their belt. (Say, version 2.2 or so…)