Many people buy more RAM to speed things up, but buying and adding more physical memory will only be a temporary, expensive measure if you don’t manage memory usage on your PC. Even PCs that have a lot of physical memory available still need to watch for actual memory usage because every program you run (and there are a lot of programs that automatically run in the background whether you want them to or not) consumes memory.

Without watching for what programs and applications you are running on your PC, especially the hidden ones and those run automatically from Windows startup are hard to catch. There are tools you can use to see what programs are running and how much memory they use.

PC Clean Maestro’s gives you easy access to the Windows Task Manager, which provides a quick view of your PC’s memory status and usage information. To open the Task Manager, click “Manage” from the main menu, select “Windows System Tools“. From the list, locate “Task Manager” and click the “Open” button. Review information provided on both the “Processes” and the “Performance” tab of the Task Manager.

You can even click the the “Mem Usage” column heading to sort programs by memory usage – you can see which applications consume most of your memory, and then you can decide which programs to remove in order to help speed up your computer.