SoftRAM - The Story of the Incredible RAM Doubling Scam (A Retrospective)
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- čas přidán 17. 04. 2020
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Back in 1995, Syncronys Softcorp released a product that had some very outlandish claims. It was known as SoftRAM, and it claimed to "double your memory" through the use of nothing but a software program. But it didn't take long for people to discover what the program actually did: Nothing.
German article I mentioned: web.archive.org/web/200501110...
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#MichaelMJD #SoftRAM #Windows95 #Scams - Věda a technologie
So I learned something interesting about SoftRAM recently and wanted to share it with you all. I got this information from a Microsoft employee who created a utility that fixed a problem with Windows 3.1, where it would display an "out of memory" error when running multiple applications in a Microsoft Exchange environment. This tool was offered to users by Microsoft for free, but the company was not advertising it. He claims that SoftRAM's developers acquired a copy of this tool, reverse engineered it, and then decided to sell it. He said that they came up with the "Double RAM" claim, as if they advertised that it was just a fix for this issue, people could discover that Microsoft offered the tool for free. Because of this, he says that people who installed SoftRAM on Windows 3.1 who had this issue suddenly no longer experienced the problem. And naturally, they believed that SoftRAM solved the problem. The double RAM claim was believable because these users no longer experienced "out of memory" errors, so it appeared like SoftRAM was actually doubling the system's memory. So the software "worked" but not because of any compression or "doubling" of memory by SoftRAM. Windows 95 fixed this issue, so the patch was no longer needed. If this is true, then it makes sense that people initially thought that only the Windows 95 version of SoftRAM didn't do anything. As I discuss in the video, people later discovered that both versions of SoftRAM didn't do what they claimed. Again, this is all coming from a MS employee who developed the fix for Win3.1 systems. Here's some more info about that tool: jeffpar.github.io/kbarchive/kb/157/Q157534/
As a side note, I'm not saying that all RAM compression tools are scams in this video, just that SoftRAM is. RAM compression is a real thing that many modern operating systems do today.
Michael MJD I actually experienced this. I didn’t buy SoftRAM, but it was installed on a 386 DX2 laptop that was given to me shortly after college. I didn’t understand how it could possibly work, but I could run some games while using SoftRAM that wouldn’t run without it on account of supposed lack of memory.
This thing was a scam, however there was a utility (RamDoubler?) for Mac in the System 6-7 era that actually did free up RAM. That was only due to the horrible memory model Mac was still using at that point, but here's a shocker for modern viewers who don't know this about old Mac... when you launched an application, you had to set ahead of time (Option+I I thought to open the menu) how much RAM it was allowed to use. There was nothing more annoying on a machine with plenty of RAM to "run out of RAM" in Photoshop doing a scan in the early days where a full page at 600 DPI took a long time, because of that horrible memory model. That program tricked the OS and the apps into their memory I believe, may have even replaced some memory routines - either way, it allowed those apps to work without freaking out. Another thing to remember, when an app crashed, you couldn't close it - you got a "bomb error", requiring a reboot. Doh. :P
That doesn't make total sense as MS Exchange did not come to be until early 1996. I do remember something about MS complaining about the software, and perhaps a lawsuit?
Also, the reason for the bump in price might have been due to the fire that effectively shut down RAM production worldwide as the resins (trying to remember the 90's here!) became in short supply and RAM went from $10/MB to $40/MB overnight so rather than spending $300+ on some hardware, maybe give the software a try? I was working at Best Buy at the time.
This kind of remind me of Quarterdeck Expanded Memory Manager (QEMM). But mainly was use for Dos games extended memory optimization. Of course this product actually worked.
Softram should rerelese the program in Windows 10 version . IF it was cheap and showed caches ,edited virtual ram and yes showed all ram stats which is fricking hard to get free
This was a great option as downloading extra ram over the internet was not feasible for most due to slow dial up speed.
Spanos 😂😂😂
Whatever dude, I just finished downloading my rtx 2800 ti
@@npc6817 lol joke's on you, i just downloaded a brand new PS5 😌
@@Josh-zq4no lol, what a shmuck, I just finished torrenting my Tesla model s p100d. 😎
Tony's Pizzeria My brand new life is almost finished downloading
"Big RAM companies HATE this one easy trick!"
Today's news outlets, sadly
@@ameralhamvi5680 Thanks to today's news outlets I began preparing for the pandemic by the third week of January. No thanks to the liar-in-chief in the White House.
*Hardware manufacturers hate him. Guy uses one weird trick to double his ram.*
A secret big ram companies don’t want you to know
Reason vote for someone else then and quit complaining
In 1983 I bought a 1MB RAM upgrade for my Sinclair ZX Spectrum for about $ 300. If I bought a 64GB RAM stick today at 1983's prices it would cost $ 19.2 million
bruh
Bruh
I bought the original 16kb RAMPACK for the ZX81 in 1982 for 100 UKP, so you got a bargain. 32BG of RAM at that rate would have cost about 20 Billion UKP
@@RobRidleyLive Crazy right ?
🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣
The irony being, the program actually REDUCED your available ram by the amount of memory it used.
Lol yeah
OR, you can say that it does increase the amount of available RAM... Just in a negative direction 🙃
For the people who don't understand, This program is no exception to the fact that all programs running use RAM.
It would be hilarious if it actually _did_ double your RAM... but used up exactly that much while it was running.
Ayo so in the early 90s people were making millions by advertising "download more ram".
You're telling me that they sold "Download More RAM" applications in stores? What a wild time that must have been
Fbi open up
Download more ram website is illegal pirating.
Yes, I think there was three of them. Quarterdeck's MagnaRAM was another.
@@katrinabryce They weren't scams at all. They did increase the amount of available RAM but at a potential speed cost. Thats why the first ones had physical addin boards with compression processors on them till computer speeds increased enough to do it all in software.
Most modern OSes use exactly the same kind of system today for hard drive storage (not RAM). Compressing files as they get written to disc, decompressing it when read. And now processors can do this in real time it not only grants additional drive space but even a speed improvement on regular spinning HDDs.
You could install more speed too.
@@zybch Quarterdeck MagnaRAM works (actually compresses RAM contents). SoftRAM does not.
I vividly remember being a kid and hanging out at an Electronics Boutique store in the mall. An older customer approached the checkout counter wanting to buy this and the clerk told him in the most condescending way possible that he shouldn't buy it and that it was a total scam. Old dude just said, "yeah, well I'll take my chances."
Weird how certain memories stick with you.
is it really chances when every card is an ace of spades
Ah, old people
@@greatman707 Don't knock us old farts too hard. Some years ago, out of curiosity, I walked into an Apple shop, just to have look around. A bright young man approached and asked if there was anything that I would like to know. I replied, probably not, I have been using Macs since 1986 and just wanted to see what was offering.
He laughed and said maybe he should be asking *me* questions about the products.
@@MarsFKA old
@@alienxotic5028 Young virgin pokemon cartoon watcher. Kids really should just only speak when they are spoken to, but the internet allows you to insult your elders without getting a slap round the face. You must love the internet.
I remember a company that would "double the capacity of your floppy disk!"
What it was, was a hole punch. That let you run single-sided floppies as double-sided. Of course, the reason they were single sided in the first place was they had sector flaws on the other side...
Ah the good old Commodore 64 days and hole punching floppies to make them double-sided :)
Companies didn't have time to check each disk for bad sectors. They pumped out thousands each day. At one time, I had hundreds of modified single-sided disks, testing each for bad sectors, with no problems whatsoever. When it came to the actual disks themselves, the only difference between single-sided and double-sided was marketing.
yeah, the hole punch ... you could get lucky and have a floppy that was good on both sides, but you also could lose data ... but then again, that could also happen any time with un-modified floppy disks (any storage media, really)
... and then there was DriveSpace/DoubleSpace and similar software wich actualy DID what it said it would do - compress the whole disk so you could store more stuff on it
My girlfriend brought me her laptop that was too slow (4Gb of RAM), so I had some ram laying around and told her I'd upgrade it. Turns out the laptop had a worn out screw and I couldnt even take it apart so I gave it back to her the way it was. A week later her brother thanked me for fixing it as now it runs faster. Damn.
Placebo upgrading
In 1995, I needed a larger monitor so I purchased a software package to make my screen bigger.
When I opened the packaging there was only a note that said "Sit closer to your screen, dummy".
oof size: large
There was a product that did that back then. It was a large flat plastic lens that you put in front of your monitor.
@@JaimeWarlock but it reduces the quality of the images shown
And did it work?
Where can I buy the extention pack?
@@shieldde6209 Absolutely, it looked like shit, plus you had to sit directly in front of it.
I had a pirated version of this when in college, I didn't see any changes and guess what, I got what I paid for ;)
Nothing? 🤣That joke is awesome, I have to note it down
Underrated
You absolutely did! 😂
Lmao good one!
lol, I eventually tried it for free this way too, Funny thing is years earlier I'd tried doing exactly what it did, increasing virtual memory settings in Windows 3.1 (I'd had a copy of Doom for years but not enough RAM to try it) so I can see where the actually implemented idea came from, and thought to myself that it might actually be effective for native windows apps, but didn't have a way to test that...
Damn, I've gotta tell my father about this... because he is still amazed, to this day, by how he recalls of a program that could double memory back in the day.
I think that after 25 long years, the old man deserves to know the truth :)
Don't do it. Don't crush an old man's good memories
Trust me. 25 years is a long time. But it gets here FAST! The older you do get. The faster time goes. Remember when you were young and a day was a long, long time? It starts to go as fast as it was slow. It's terrifying!
@@asbestosfibers1325 that's basically what I said or Maybe did poorly. There's a region in our brain. Time flys as we get older. I read up.on it. I don't have the technical terms down. But yes. Tortures go on - on -on. Like me sitting for jury duty. But overall time perception. Time goes Soo fast from 16 till now. It sucks. But as you get older. Stress isn't tolerated much. This is where biology comes in. So we don't have a heart Attack in scenarios. That's the theory by scientists anyways.
@@creamwobbly lol. I bet. Sounds as blissful as being extracted from a mountain top with a broken leg. It's BIOLOGICAL & backed science. Our PERCEPTION (I didn't think I had to crayon it) of time goes fast. You may not realize it now. Why I live by one rule. To bed by ,830pm & up by ,5am. 7 days a week. Days go so much longer then. You can't fight the imminent
@@kashmirwillwin3124 First tell Kashmiris to stop attacking Army and to stop ter0rism
My highschool downloaded something like this and installed it on every Mac in the computer lab. Those things chugged HARD. A year later they replaced every single Mac.
Lmao what a shit IT team
@@sheriffaboubakar9720 they shouldnt have hired the dude who installed it on the macs... seriously. my friend knew that when he was 8 years old
They got what they deserved. Fried all Macs because of some software.
In fairness, older macs didn't actually have virtual memory built in so this sort of product was legitimately useful. The downside is if it wasn't set up properly it would kill your HDD in a relatively short amount of time.
@@sheriffaboubakar9720 every school IT team is a shit IT team lol
"Imagine 4mb becomes 8mb"
Key word, *imagine*
@Maintenance Renegade technically you don't need to have two identical byte sets to have two copies (e.g. copy on write)
@Maintenance Renegade I can help you with that. One copy of Sonic the Hedgehog 2 for the Sega Genesis/Mega Drive is 1MB. Now Sonic the Hedgehog 2 for the Master System/Game Gear is 512KB or ½MB. Therefore two copies of Sonic the Hedgehog 2 can fit into 1MB
404 likes,comment not found
Wow THX guys😂😂😂
🌈 imagine
Ah, the placebo effect. Around 1998/1999 I was doing IT for a bank. When users would complain that their computer was slow we would go into the registry and change the delay for when a start menu would expand after hovering over it. They were amazed how much faster their computer was. :)
That delay shouldn't have been so large. It was very annoying.
It's a well known practice in the Heating/Venting/AC design of office buildings to install dummy thermostats for employees to be able to adjust without actually doing anything. It reduces complaints more than installing an actual thermostat.
woooooow
tbf, that actually changed something
@@Sphere723 wait whaet
I remember this product. My wife bought it for her computer. She told me that it was just as ineffective as the soft ram that I gave her the night before.
A self roast, those are rare
At least she didn't pay $79.95 for your soft ram.
Your wife talks too much should've put your floppy disk into her Hotmail.
That was SO lame.
Oh so your wife rather have double ram in her motherboard. 😉
Thanks so much for making this video! When I was a young kid at school using my first ever PC at home, I always wondered if Soft RAM really worked. Even my young self thought something about the software was very fishy, and you finally helped me to put this situation to rest!
This is like what DownloadMoreRAM evolved from
Yeah but it cost something
How to increase your RAM
get an ssd and use it as a SWAP memory.
@@MiiMaker instead of buying an ssd buy more. fucking. ram.
buy a usb and store your apps on there
Mii Maker xD
I remember when I got my first computer hard drive. I thought "I'll never fill up this 20mb beast!"
You probably never did fill up that 20mbs with the computers and software back then. I certainly didn't. But, computers changed, programs changed, and storage space demands increased.
@@robinstewart6510 Yeah. What were you going to fill it up with? Your collection of 320x200 16 color pictures? Your entire library of midi files? Maybe that massive database of contacts for your rotary phone, or all those recipes?
@@DJ_Force .. Lol. While it would have been difficult to fill it at the time, lets not be too quick to dismiss those early hard drives. They were the future (even if most weren't convinced of it at the time), allowing us to go from multiple floppy disks for programs and files to a single hard drive containing everything, and also allowing for larger, more complex, programs that couldn't fit on a single floppy disk.
Business users also benefited. I setup a database for Oshkosh Trucks which allowed them to track and schedule the maintenance and service of their vehicles used by our Army & Air Force in Europe, which I very quickly transferred to a hard drive. Just a short time earlier, that would have required the storage capability of an expensive minicomputer rather than an inexpensive microcomputer.
By the way, I had a fairly large collection of public domain programs back then (programming ideas and samples) that would have easily filled several of those 20mb hard drives. However, since all that was already sorted based on those floppies and wasn't used often, I never did put those on a hard drive.
back then, I would fill that up in a whiile. Now it takes like 1 second
One more thing. Lets not forget copy-protection was a major hurdle for early hard drives. Nearly all games and many other programs came on copy-protected floppies (later CD's) that prevented transfer to a hard drive. It took many years to find reliable solutions to defeat copy-protection. Indeed, the battle still rages today.
Ah, the good old days when ten whole computers could be made from the resources required by Chrome on a blank page.
imagine telling someone back then that a browser is gonna consume 1 gb of ram for 5 tabs
@@KaranSingh-jr2eu They'd say "what is a tab?"
SoftRAM: * requires 4MB of RAM *
Me: * proceeds installing it on 2MB of RAM since it will double it *
1337
@@cyphaborg6598.x
underrated comment lol,
Are you trying to break the universe?
Pro tip: Installing softram twice will quadruple your own ram
Jokes on them i bought 2 of them to quadruple my ram
Jokes on you mate, I ran it twice on my PC.
Jokes on you mofos i'm the one who fucking found soft ram.
Jokes on you i actually replaced my ram with those disk
Kai Howells I used it hhhhhhhhhiuhjbhgvhhgjhnjbvnhvjk *glitched sounds* times :D
OkImDramatic you aren’t funny
I think one reason they were able to sell this is because hard drive compression programs like Windows DriveSpace and Stacker were popular around that time. Someone who doesn't know a lot of about computers might think "if I can double my hard drive space why can't I double my ram?"
It's not worthless, simply put it into a DOS days machine.
Nice to know that “download more ram” has long history dating back to the 90s
So it was like homeopathic medicine for computers! Yeah, I actually remember this along with "RAM Doubler" and I knew they were bunk at the time.
Yeah it just ended up being a total scam. I actually did a bit of research into RAM Doubler, and apparently people say that it performed memory compression. But obviously it didn't "double" the physical RAM in your Mac. I never used it though. Love your videos by the way! : )
At least a placebo for humans makes more sense... Even if they don't tell you that's all it is.
The 8-Bit Guy hey
Download More RAM!
RAM Doubler was different and it actually worked. That is because the Mac always reserved a fixed amount of RAM for each application. RAM Doubler freed up the unused portions.
Ahh yes... SoftRAM... one of the many products released over the years to target the “I don’t know how a computer works” market
At the time, installing RAM was expensive and people didn't have resources like Reddit or any other internet tool. Yahoo was almost unknown. The idea of buying software was low risk.
@@JoePolvino Books existed.
@@digibluh I don't know where you are from, but my city has several branches of libraries. They most certainly had (and still have) a technology department that had books with detailed information about computers and how they work.
@@vcvortex6356 Wtf is your point?
@@MrBeetsGaming My point is that Joe Polvino insinuated that people did not have access to learn about computers by going to the library pre-internet, and we certainly did. Do you need a reading comprehension course?
“A gigabyte of ram should be enough”
Ikr not even a TB of RAM is enough.
I'm in.
I understood that reference
“We’re in”
Mr vaccine himself Mr Gates must be embarrassed making that statement
Me:"Hm, a program that somehow gives you more ram via software? how could this work? compression?"
MJD: "it was a total scam"
Me: "oh, i guess that makes sense"
I remember back in high school when my friend and I were led to believe that all USB sticks had the same storage space and the corporations were selling them with the space locked off so they could sell the same thing for higher and higher prices. We thought that because we saw people doing something that would increase the storage. We finally did it and all you're doing is making the device tell your computer it has more space. I dumped all my music onto a 4GB stick and then didn't understand why all my files wouldn't play or were corrupt.
I remember my teacher telling me we could use USB sticks for ram and while it wasn't entirely false, you were better off getting actual sticks
@@MechWarrior894 Now, that's not only approved by Microsoft, but it was implemented by them for Vista. I still remember everyone hating on Vista... I am fine since I had quad core i7 and 12gb tri channel ddr3, but all these people with slow dual core and 2-4gb ram really hated vista.
Several years ago a friend found this really good deal for 32GB ‘Kingston’ USB sticks for an unbelievably cheap price. We suspected that it was a scam, but it was so cheap that we tried it anyway. Of course these proved to be fakes. It were 4GB sticks with their controller reprogrammed to make it believe that it was connected to a 32GB chip. The weird thing was that on the outside they all looked the same (a bad copy of a real Kingston design), but on the inside they were all different. I did manage to reprogram mine back to its correct capacity.
Actually that's exactly the case. Sometimes it's more expensive to make two production lines instead of just to lock off additional storage and sell it for different prices.
@@alexanderthomas2660 you got lucky that it was 4gb, which is a decent amount of space. Once I spent around $20 for a 32gb stick which was fake and only supported around 1gb of files.
Around the mid 90's, RAM was so obscenely expensive and often the priciest part of the entire computer. With that in mind, the temptation of things like this becomes much easier to grasp.
Exactly!
And most likely you would have to buy a new motherboard since your RAM was already max out on it, so now add the cost of a new motherboard which back then would cost $300-$400 in addition to the new RAM.
Computers were the latest rage in the '90's and the were pretty costly and the promise of this RAM alternative was easy to get suckered in by. It happened to me. I admit it. I was a poor 20 something that was short on cash.
Actually I think the monitor was the most expensive part of your PC.
One CRD monitor of decent size, like say 22 or 24 inches, cost upwards of $400 or more!
Luckily the prices began to drop significantly by early 1996. By mid 1998 it was no longer financially ruinous to stick 1 GB in a (for example) Windows NT workstation.
The same as in the 70's and 80's.
@@xenxander Yeah, that much would probably have bought you 4MB of RAM at retail pricing. Probably more if you ordered. (Yeah, back then, the difference between "retail" and "mail order" prices for components was enormous. Far bigger than it is today.)
Yeah these infact slowed the computer down some more...
TRUE
Only when switching between programs stored in virtual memory. Once a program was back in actual memory, there was no noticeable change in performance. Even games performed as they should.
For the people who don't understand, This program is no exception to the fact that all programs running use RAM.
@@wohao_gaster7434 .. Exactly. As I suggested, these programs operated by moving running programs in and out of RAM, with the program currently being used in active RAM and other running programs not used at the moment temporarily stored on a hard drive or a RAM disk.
If done right, it gave the illusion of multiple programs running at the same time. You could quickly switch back and forth between the programs, copy & paste between them, and so on. Later versions even allowed the windows of the various programs to remain on the screen, and for small portions of the inactive programs to remain running in active RAM (processing data, etc).
Most 16-bit (and some 8-bit) operating systems ultimately used this technique (killing third-party options like SoftRAM). However, changes in hardware (processors, etc) eventually eliminated the need for such software trickery, allowing multiple programs to actually fully run in RAM at the same time.
"Placebo software"
Reminds me of certain Windows features...
Name any.
@@sierrachief117 Admittedly, I don't remember any. They're all small things that Windows advertises but don't actually function correctly, if at all-usually not very important. Between that and the fact that I don't use Windows as much as I used to (after getting frustrated with how slow, irritating, and high-maintenance it is, I switched to Mac, and I'll soon be switching to Linux), nothing specific comes to mind.
Even if I'm wrong, though, it's still a fun jab at the buggiest OS I know...
@@Klffsj they've improved with windows 10 leaps and bounds. I agree macOS is better. It is there is no doubt about that. But windows is fast catching up. Only thing that is buggy today in windows is the update client.
@@sierrachief117 I disagree with that. I still use Windows 10 for work, but I don't play around with settings or customization like I would on a personal laptop a few years ago. Anyway, at the moment I've got a bug where I can't open Action Center. Rebooting fixes the problem temporarily, but it comes back. Admittedly, I haven't updated recently, but what problems could that cause?
Windows has a long ways to go. It's using an outdated and confusing architecture, and the more they "fix" things, the messier it gets. Microsoft would be wise to make a new OS from scratch, not merely forking the previous version of Windows...
@@Klffsj Well, at least Microsoft isn't doing away with 32-bit support like Apple is.
I want a SoftRam T-Shirt now
k
Swear to god if I ever come across one I’m gonna buy it for any amount of money lol
@@TylerWadleigh $15 and print your own. I doubt you'll run into any copyright issues.
@@tankerock I’m gonna have to find a reference photo tho 😂 I gotta look but otherwise you’re right
*RAM
I remember this SoftRAM software. During my first ever job after leaving university I was an IT tech at a Further Education College in Scotland. My boss showed me this and said It sounded good. He gave me a copy to put on the IT tech PC - running Windows 95.
It took literally 25 seconds to install. I was very against it, as I could see no way how it would work. I wrote my report and gave it to my boss, he said he had purchased 100 copies of it. - for the PC's in the Computer Studies Department.
I was told to install it on a lab of 25 machines. This was typical of the college, wasting money.
I left in 1998 for a new job, when I was tidying out m desk I found 100 disks of this sitting under a pile of A4 paper.
Waste. Should of installed it. It actually worked
@@n1k32h it was a reverse engineer for a win 3.1 fix MS made for free(not advertised/promoted)
@@fran5678can Yes but he said 98 that means Windows 98 was out, and the app only performed badly on Win95.
Think about it.
Bullshit...I think someone is trying too hard.
As a software developer, I can't imagine writing something to deliberately deceive your customers like this.
The leadership at the company responsible for this should have gone to jail.
Modern version of this is "PC Cleaning" software.
@@MosesMatsepane elaborate please
@@NicholasNRG ("PC cleaning" software is basically useless and usually asks you to pay for it)
@@MosesMatsepane literally
I was just beginning to learn how computers worked when I heard about this product. With my at the time beginner’s knowledge, I reasoned that what softram was claiming to do would trade CPU cycles for more virtual ram. That’s trading one problem for another, so I never touched it.
I had forgotten about this scam, so thank you for the trip into my memories.
This is like putting more expensive gas in your car to get more passenger seats.
Except gas would at least do something useful
Урал лучший город yeah farting makes my belly feel better
Ha ha ha
Where to buy that gas?
What? This doesn’t work getting additional seats?!
Zram on linux can quite literally double your ram through memory compression, but it comes at the cost of CPU cycles
There's no free lunches
Windows 10 has this built in as well. I'm guessing you're not going to get 50% compression on most things though?
@@kernelpanic9373 Memory compression actually tends to work quite well. Unpacked data can have a lot of redundancy, and most software doesn't actually use all the memory it allocates; a significant portion of it is wasted in tiny bits of slack space that is either there to align the data for efficient consumption or reserved for the storage of future data that is never generated.
@@kernelpanic9373 if you're mostly having browser tabs you can get a 50% increase (not a 100% like SoftRAM claimed), such as from 16 to 24 GB, with all those redundant bits in sandboxed pages and stuff I guess? Or JS bloat?
@@kaitlyn__L Zram on linux can do 2:1 compression, often more, i.e doubling the RAM capacity. It generally compresses a decent amount better than what windows 10 offers but is slow by comparison. I've seen memory compression ratios as high as 10:1 in my daily usage. If you're insane, using the zstd algorithm in zram is an option on newer kernels, which provides even better compression but is even slower.
@@kaitlyn__L :
That might be useful. I use Linux Mint and Kubuntu. On both systems, Firefox is a RAM hog. It just leaks memory until I hit the swap file. I only had 10 tabs open. When it hits the swap file, the system dies. Can't move the mouse anymore. I am forced to press PWR button.
So, I switched to a system with more RAM. I use to have 4 GB, now I have 8 GB.
It uses somewhere from 5 GB to 6.5 GB. That is fucking incredible.
I remember seeing those boxes in places like Costco and Target. It was back in the day when all software came from a physical disk of some sort .
That whole gauge looks exactly like when we want to overclock the graphics card. My ATI Radeon 9700 Pro can turn into RTX 3070 with Synchronys new SoftGPU. It works great for me. I believe the company turned things around now
Wow... It probably took them a couple of hours to make the GUI in VisualBasic and then they started to sell it at 80 bucks a piece.
Yep. Great comment.
And the developer went to work for CSI NY.
That would be for the images and gauges then (unless they bought those which is more likely), the rest should take less than 10 minutes.
@@b3ans4eva yep. the gauge actually tracks ip addresses
@@quad7375 Since everyone was on dial-up back then, there were no individual ip address since you would've been sharing a dial-up node with dozens of other subscribers to your ISP.
I knew a guy who bought that against my advice. A week later he threw it out and bought some RAM modules instead.
We never talked about it again.
I remember a friend talking about this program way back then. Even without knowing anything about it I kept trying to explain that even with compression it wouldn't be double and it would slow the machine down while it compressed memory.
He was still a big fan of it and used his pirated copy for a while. I didn't want it even for free since it sounded like a scam even back then.
@@the_omg3242 Much like my experience and the memory speed loss due to compression would be negligible but it was just too good to be true.
I guess we got the last laugh.
Jeff Holinski why couldn’t it be double with compression? Maybe not practically - especially at the time - and of course the product was BS but theoretically you could halve the size just like you can get 50% or lower compression ratio when compressing a file.
@@Kado_Tornado but then you have to uncompress it anyways no?
So? My point is if you apply 50% compression to anything that you want to put into RAM, you effectively double your RAM just like this product claimed. Compress as it goes in and uncompress as it comes out. If, theoretically, all your programs could uncompress on-demand, it all works. I realize that as a practical matter, there’s no way all the added processing would result in an overall performance increase. I also realize that applications would have to store the uncompressed version of the data somewhere other than RAM. Maybe that is where the “it won’t be double” comes from. But if you have an extremely high compression, it’s RAM to RAM operations instead of having to load from the hard drive, so you can still theoretically achieve this.
You know it's a scam whenever it tells you "congratulations for your purchase" rather than "thank you"
I used to use RAM Doubler on the Mac back in the ‘90s. It claimed to use free hard disk space as RAM, but it wasn’t unlimited it would only “double” the physical RAM you had installed. It did work, you could open more programs because it somehow tricked the system into thinking it had more RAM to work with, but things ran slower compared to actually having more physical RAM installed in the computer.
This takes the "download more ram" joke to a whole different level
where do you think the joke started from
@@atharvaprabhu7467 true, and my 10 year old me was furious that the pc got even more unstable with the ram doubler 🤣
Wild times indeed
Lol
But what if I installed it twice? DOUBLE DOUBLE the ram 🤣🤣🤣
You’re computer will explode from all the power :/
Hahaha quantum computer in the 90s
Millenian question u asked sir 😅👍🏼
@hwhehe hehehe says the one with the big chungus pfp
That's the secret !
I feel no guilt for Pirating this software back in my BBS days.
why would you waste your time on this?
As opposed to feeling _really_ guilty for all the other things you pirated? Mkay...
We had a very strong Citadel86 community in my city from 89 to about 95.
@@JamesDavidWalley Don't copy that floppy!!
I pirate everything.
Wow! The good ol' days when scammers had to produce a product and take out ads at the back of computer magazines to target victims. Kids these days don't know how easy they have it.
11:44 There's a Russian analogy to the age old saying with a similar meaning:
_"Free cheese, can only be found on a mousetrap"._
🙃
Unironically: Sounds great! :-)
Бесплатный сыр только в мышеловке
The mouse pays with its own life, it's not free cheese.
@@andrew_tate unless the mouse survives, which they do sometimes...
@@neoupath8823 still some kids who don't get it
Ex-CEO Rainer Poertner now runs a stock-promotion website that takes shares in penny stocks as payment for promotion campaigns. Shocking twist.
@Maintenance Renegade America, the land where corporations have more rights than people.
@@PrincessFelicie Corporations are People in US
@@BenState and people are their test piglets 😜
Catgirl Princess Félicie Imagine trying to sue the individuals behind a company of 5000 people. Who do you hold responsible if everyone was a little bit responsible?
@@innosam123 The issue is moreso the lack of restrictions when it comes to businesses and what they can do. Obviously you can't really hold people personally responsible for the failure of a business, that's one of the benefits of being a business. However, in return for that benefit it's expected that you recieve negatives as well, since, well, businesses aren't people. A business, as it is now, has the rights of a person *and* a business, with none of the negatives associated with either. A person has the rights of a person, and the negatives of a person, and that's it.
That's the issue with treating businesses the same as individuals, it creates terrible exploits that can be used to game the system. (For example, a business can be bought out on loan, then *that* loan can be put on *that* business) That's what they mean by "corporations have more rights than people." It's not really an offensive statement, or inherently provacative, it's just a matter of the system that is currently in use.
Holy MJD, almost 1,000,000 views?!? That's *insane!* Congrats on (almost) a million views Michael!
I remember they had softram knock off products too. I installed one called RAM Doubler or something like that. It wasn't until an IT buddy laughed at me and showed me how to install an actual RAM chip into my computer that I realized I'd been duped. Great video ...
1995 = Upgrading from 16MB to 32MB for an affordable price? "If it's too good to be true..."
2020 = Upgrading from 16GB to 32GB for an affordable price? "If it's too good to be true..."
Standard was 4mb if you were lucky you had 8mb, the upgrade cost around £180 some earthquake had nuked chip plants in Japan and there was a world wide memory shortage.
**laughs in iPod touch 6th generation**
I had 12mb in my 486 after windows 95 came out, maybe late 95, it was £140 from a trade only place, normal retail was around £170 at the time for an 8mb simm.
I actually updated my PC from 16 to 32GB of RAM for less than SoftRAM95 cost. So affordable in a certain sense, at least.
even 16GB hard drives were a distant future in '95.
Something else that a lot of people don’t remember:
The price of physical RAM more than doubled around the early to mid 90s. Supposedly one of the Japanese factories that made them burned down. This combined with Windows 95’s release made the market ripe for a scam like this one..
I remember seeing this for sell in the electronics department of Wal-Mart when I was 14. The thing is, it was completely cheap and easy to just buy more RAM from Wal-Mart and install in my pc. I just read the section on the PC manual on installing RAM and then followed directions. I bought two 4MB ram chips for about $20 each and installed them on my Win 3.1 Packard Bell. The PC came with only 4MB.
I read those c't articles at that time. It was a lot of fun - especially after many many other computer magazines had articles about how great this works.
Ah, the original “system booster/registry cleaner” scamware! Shows that no matter the era, people still fall for BS like this!
If people are this dumb i don't blame companies for taking advantage of it, free money.
To be fair, the average user isn't going to be any the wiser. It isn't a claim that can be easily tested.
@@ChristopherGray00 Imagine if doctors thought like you.
@@cesariushervelazco8 this isn't even remotely comparable to healthcare, people should know the basics of computers if they plan on using them
@@ChristopherGray00 even doctors fell for that scam, they are not dumb, they simply don't have the time to learn "the basics" of computers and neither do hundreds of thousands of people working in other fields.
:D I remember this. My boss bought one copy and wanted me to install this on all of our company computers. No way.... And he paid full retail LMAO
Oh so he's a pirate too, wonderful. It's probably only licensed for one PC per box :D He really thought he outsmarted them.
@@SianaGearz love Society where in the situation where this guy was scammed into buying essentially pirated software he's the ass for wanting to use the software that he bought on more then one of his computers.
As though that would hurt the company that was selling free software for 80 bucks Per disc
@@mauirandall8176 there's a saying - which is unfortunately painfully wrong - that you can't scam a honest person. To an extent that it is sometimes true, there's major class of scams that are designed to attract specifically dishonest people, in order to protect the scammer. This has certain parallels. The target of this software and such scams is the guy who doesn't stop and think "ok but is it really right" but people who deem themselves grifters but don't have the skill or the brain.
@@SianaGearz wat
@@SianaGearz or you know maybe the reason the guy bought and wanted to use it was because it was fucking 1995, computers were relatively new and people didn’t understand how computer storage actually worked
I got it off the dollar rack and did work with my system, swap adjustments did nothing for programs that just refused to load because low physical memory, this did fix that.
It did work for the memory compression on one specific system I had, one with a compression chip built into the i/o card. That card was magic, access to drivespace compressed drives was faster than uncompressed drives, also made the floppy tape backup run full speed w/o buffering. The card did not work with 95 at all but would in 98 with compression set to max for whatever reason.
Right before Windows 95 came out there had been a ram shortage due to a manufacturing plant fire or some such and I remember paying $1000 for 16 megs.... If I remember right, I think less than a month later the prices were down to a couple hundred dollars... I still have that ram, it's worthless now, but still a memento of an exciting time...
They sold merch? Did the tee shirt say "I'm a sucker"?
Nope, it said IR ID10T
"This 'S' size shirt became 'L' - poweredbysoftram"
$80 probably seemed like a bargain back when ram prices were crazy.
A$100 per megabyte (about US$80/megabyte) back then. Crazy times indeed.
@Maintenance Renegade nice
And now you can buy 8-12 gigs of ram for ~80$, which is fairly enough for gaming. Times change...
Thought I'd come across a video discussing this topic sooner or later, it was in my list!!!
I remember using a software that could format 1,44MB floppy disk into 1,6MB. It worked actually. in the past, it meant so much!
Yeah, I've used this tool a lot. It was called VGACopy. Good ol' days
I remember this Sh*t when I was a teenager - luckily I was computer savvy enough to know it was BS.
It didn't really stand out as fake or impossible for computer savvy people actually, precisely because there were other similar applications that actually did what they claim.
Only after installing and testing would you start to notice that it actually didn't do anything.
It compresses your RAM. It's not BS.
@@hexagonist23 why would I buy something that compress?
@@hexagonist23 this one in particular doesn't even compress your RAM {period} it literally does nothing except change your page file size for you
@@Rhine0Cowboy Not RAM, temporary RAM
4:30 That is really well written. Total BS, but well written. Reminds me of some of my High School essays...
Yeah I swear what they are describing would possibly be feasible too? I mean I don't know why they would need the page file to compress RAM and by god it would take way longer to decompress the data but hey
😂🤣😅
@@Diorden119 ftqf3u0vi vqfn yqequ8vqgunwqin
This and doublespace/stacker were great when there was a power outage. Typically it required that the pc be blasted and rebuilt
about the same time, there was a product for macs by connectix titled "ram doubler", its was simply amazing and did what it claimed. But yah, it basically was a scratch disk/paging file so you needed hard drive space. But it actually sped up the old 68040s drastically in most scenarios.
Adding more RAM manually: Small brain
Dealing with barely any RAM: Normal brain
Downloading more RAM: Big Brain
Buying SoftRAM: MEGA BRAIN
I am a simple man. I see Satania I like.
Uploading RAM: Megamind
Returning SoftRam for your money back, BUT LEAVING IT INSTALLED: SUPER MEGA BRAIN!!
girl
Using Linux with zRam: Dr. Manhattan's brain
This is the sort of thing my Dad and grandparents would fall for.
That is exactly the target market for these unscrupulous bastards.
uK8cvPAq This is the kind of thing I’m terrified my mum or siblings will fall for.
This actually happened to my Grandfather. He brought it home to me randomly one day thinking it would help him play Flight Unlimited. $79>$200 for an actual 4MB RAM upgrade (in which he did eventually buy after this turned out to be fake).
@@BrendonGreenNZL Three words for you:' Heartland America Catalog'
Still less lucrative than micro transaction cosmetics for the playas
I blurted out laughing so hard when you quickly added the piece of paper so it can say SoftScam 😂🤣
A friend of mine had a bootleg disk of this. We tried it on his machine and saw the prompts and the guages...
I didn't delve into it too deeply but did come across the CNET article and after a few searches on Yahoo and AOL, found that it wasn't what it promised.
My buddy had long since removed it - it was interfering with (OG) Wolfenstein.
Few things are as hilarious to me as scams with merch. Like the Bonzi Buddy Plush they gave you for subscribing to Bonzi Buddy club.
I had no idea that they made a Bonzi Buddy plush and I need to get one now 😂
someone remade bonzi into a portable program without malware, its over on game jolt
Imaging entering an hardware store to buy more RAM and exiting with a floppy disk
Well back then upgrading physical RAM was really expensive.
Most likely your RAM was already maxed out on your motherboard at say 4mg, 8mb or 16mb. If you wanted to upgrade, you would have to get a new motherboard that would accept higher RAM and motherboards back then ran about $400.+, and the new RAM chips would probably be another $200.+
I got suckered into back then, shelled out $29. and almost immediately felt that it was bullshit because I saw no improved performance. I was in my mid 20's, didn't have a lot of money to upgrade my pc, so I saw this at Egghead and bought it.
Yep, live and learn.
You need to understand that a couple of years previously diskdoubler software was very popular and did work to some extent, so the concept of extra memory from software was plausible.
Hey, it's still hardware!
hard disk compression was a big thing back then, being included in version of DOS, i seem to remember that some suppliers would quote the compressed size as the actual HD size, which was never 2x but they would still double it.
Happy memories disk compression, ram disk's, config.sys , do you want your mouse, you soundcard , or CDROM, pick 2 your not getting 3.
Fannying around with emm386, trying to free up that extra couple of k... Ahh, memories!
Back when I had a non-expandable Macintosh, virtual memory programs like this were a godsend. They allowed me to run multiple programs (switching back & forth into memory), something impossible before. Apple later came out with their own version (called Switcher), still later building this capability into their operating system.
The GUI reminds me a lot of MSI's Afterburner
Wow another speed boosting program!
@@masgatos1801 Except, it's actually useful.
@@masgatos1801 Smartass
Bill P except MSI can *actually* give you better performance, unlike this bull.
And MSI's Afterburner is free. Can't get ripped off by paying nothing for something.
Ah, so this is where the "download more RAM" meme started.
After reading many of the comments it feels like a walk down memory lane for an older computer tech from back in the day.....lol There are mentions of products and issues that I have long since forgotten and haven't heard of them being mentioned anywhere as well..... FYI. I'm still working only I left the PC support world to go into network and data systems many years ago. But my IT roots began as a desktop/network support tech.
I remember this, it was everywhere!
"do you want more ram? Then install this software that uses your ram up to lie to you!"
Please tell me this is there the "Download More Ram" meme comes from.
I think its came from scammer website..
This is the OG of downloading more RAM.
Nah. Naive users. Plain and simple.
People think everyone in the world is there to rip them off.
Though companies do lock out features from their products to use the same assembly line for different products. Nvidia's Quadro series for workstations use the exact same gpu their gaming (and btc mining) video cards use. They lock out certain features in gaming cards so companies need to pay a premium for the purpose built ones.
Gaming cards support ECC VRAM, for example (the VRAM lacks hardware for ECC though).
@@krisyannuruha5147 meme website
Sort of, back in the late 90s/early 2000s there where a bunch of scam companies that would use similar products online as a means to distribute spyware/adware. That was probably the more direct inspiration.
As systems developer, I actually looked into this when it came out, because I was incredulous that they could implement effective real-time page compression and decompression that didn’t have an enormous compute overhead for the demand-page virtual memory subsystem. To patch the memory manager to implement additional page prioritization levels and then algorithmically select pages for compression, compress and decompress on demand, etc., seemed like complete nonsense in 1995. It was conceptually interesting, but would have likely proven completely ineffectual, as it’d inject a huge number of (for the time) hideously intensive and latency increasing memory operations. As it turned out, it didn’t actually do anything at all.
But, oddly enough, modern operating systems actually implement paging priority levels and dynamic page compression. Then again, just a single modern CPU core is many hundreds of times more powerful, compared to what we had in 95. But, despite the addition of page compression, it hasn’t led to any massive reduction in working set sizes… at best it’s in the 10% range, so the idea that one could double available memory through dynamic real-time page compression is pretty silly.
I used RamDoubler for Macintosh around this time, and it was definitely not a scam. Obviously it did not TRULY double your RAM capacity, but it allowed you to run applications that demanded more RAM. I was totally satisfied with it.
Back in those days, Connectix Ram Doubler was my tool of choice. Kept the memory nice and clean and handled the Swap memory really well :)
RamDoubler was the real deal. It worked exactly as advertised. You couldn't run an app that required more memory than you had installed, but you could run multiple programs that together used more memory than you had. It was a great tool for multitasking where you normally would have to quit one app to open another.
This video brings back what I had long forgotten. Back then, while I had no idea at all about the lawsuit, an $80 check arrived in my mailbox together with a letter saying something like someone had won a case against them and I was eligible for this just because my name was among those in their customer database. Bless the US consumer protection system!
Bless the non existing employee rights, the non existing universal health-care, the incredibly undemocratic bipartisan system, ...
I could go on for another hour.
@@KRWWWLNGDon't forget the lobbying and US companies seeing consumers as moneybags they can scam, since the gov does NOT care.
I remember setting my page file to a larger size. Takes me back. =)
I saw this everywhere back in the 90s. Never bought it but I was always curious!
SoftRAM DID do something: It took up 950k on your HD, and 950k in memory when you loaded it.
So I don't know why you are complaining it didn't do anything?
Not 950k altogether if the program is written using dynamic loader. 😁
Oh, splash screens when you start your pc, i forgot about those.
*laughs in Discord*
Bought HP Pavilion Media Center TV PC (probably model a1340n ) with XP from Costco in mid 2000's. Besides the bells and whistles pc came with, remembered the selling point for me was, somewhere on packaging box specs said 2 gigs of ram. I remember thinking this was a steal of a deal and bought it with excitement that lasted long enough that by time I figured while system was reporting 2 - half was virtual, was too late to do return.
I remember all these RAM doubling or free Ram applications from back then. I had one I used that actually did something although I don't remember what it was called. In order to free up more Ram it would tell the OS it needed as much memory as possible then stop which would cause windows to pull back memory from other applications that may have not been using it.
I was pretty young at the time but I do remember it solving some issues with games not running properly
That’s one of the best videos you have ever made MJD
Glad to hear that, thanks so much!
Michael MJD keep up the good work
@@mystical3498 Will do! : )
What are you going to do in your next video
Joe Johnson i agree
That boxed sealed version of Softram may have actually been worth some money as a collector's item. :) You could have been on an episode of Pawnstars!
This channel's content gives me flashbacks of middle and high school
I used a really good ram manager back in the ‘90s that worked really well with Windows 95, it used a paging scheme you had control of. You could stipulate what was paged, when, it was quite verbose but as memory got cheaper it was abandon. I don’t remember the name but it did really well once you put some time in configuring it optimally. It had a feel to it like the ram manager in Apple OS8 and OS9.
reminds me when my dad bought his pc and they charged him for 4 extra drives. it was just 4 more partitions in the same hard drive lol
Lmao that's actually really devious and fucked up
Did you ask him if he saw the technician installing the drives? It probably happened like this: they opened My Computer and showed the one and only drive called C:, then said I can add 4 extra drives D to G for only $$$ more. Deal!.. clickity clickity click (in the partition manager software), and tada: D, E, F, G
@@adtc what are you talking about. he didnt know any more about computers than I knew...this was 1994. Only nerds knew about this stuff back then. Needless to say we both are wiser now as the times have required it.
you kinda have to admire them for that, that's a Dick Dastardly play if I ever saw it.
@@davidrenton yeah. its his fault too. buyer beware unfortunately. if it was today....you can be sure I would be spamming their reviews on yelp.
The german magazine at 5:11 is the c't, europe's biggest tech magazine still made to this day. I am actually subscribed to it :D
They say that it's the biggest but i seriously doubt that's actually true. Because c't is limited to German-speaking countries and i think the Netherlands with a translated edition while CHIP is translated and printed all over the world in Poland, Ukraine, Russia, Czech Rep., Hungary, i think Romania, Italy, etc. But i can't say i'm fond of CHIP. If you took just the German editions of CHIP and c't, then c't for sure is at least twice as popular, which means if you considered all editions of CHIP to be separate publications, then c't would be the single largest in all of Europe, but CHIP has a larger international reach because in many European countries there is no publication of comparable quality to c't.
Thanks for this information
Softram seemed to make good sense at the time. Many of us were used to using Ram cartridges in our computers (my Commodore 64 for example). I think they expected people to assume their new computers needed more RAM like the old ones did.