Increase your RAM - free of cost

Now this is called a tip of the year! While working with the Task Manager I observed the following. You can also try it out.

• Start any application, say Word. Open some large documents.
  
• Now start the Task Manager processor tab and sort the list in descending order on Mem Usage. You will notice that Winword.exe will be somewhere at the top, using multiple MBs of memory. Note down the number.
  
• Now switch to Word and simply minimise it. (Do not use the Minimize All option of the task bar).
  
• Now go back to the Task Manager and see where Winword.exe is listed. Most probably you will not find it at the top. You will typically have to scroll to the bottom of the list to find Word. Now check out the amount of RAM it is using. Compare it with the original. Surprised? The memory utilisation has reduced by a huge amount.
  
• So where is the tip of the year? Simple — minimise each application that you are currently not working on by clicking on the Minimize button, and you can increase the amount of available RAM by a substantial margin. Depending upon the number and type of applications you use together, the difference can be as much as 50 percent of extra RAM—and all this is free of cost!

It is nothing unexpected actually. In any multitasking system, minimising an application means that it won’t be utilised by the user right now. Therefore, the OS automatically makes the application use virtual memory and keeps bare minimum amounts of the code in physical RAM. I have not tried it, but I am sure it would work exactly the same way even in earlier versions of Windows (and any other multitasking system).

jatropha

When Suleiman Diarra Banani’s brother said that the poisonous black seeds dropping from the seemingly worthless weed that had grown around his family farm for decades could be used to run a generator, or even a car, Mr. Banani did not believe him. When he suggested that they intersperse the plant, until now used as a natural fence between rows of their regular crops — edible millet, peanuts, corn and beans — he thought his older brother, Dadjo, was crazy.

“I thought it was a plant for old ladies to make soap,” he said.

But now that a plant called jatropha is being hailed by scientists and policy makers as a potentially ideal source of biofuel, a plant that can grow in marginal soil or beside food crops, that does not require a lot of fertilizer and yields many times as much biofuel per acre planted as corn and many other potential biofuels. By planting a row of jatropha for every seven rows of regular crops, Mr. Banani could double his income on the field in the first year and lose none of his usual yield from his field.

bye-bye batteries?

An Austin-based startup called EEStor promised "technologies for replacement of electrochemical batteries," meaning a motorist could plug in a car for five minutes and drive 805km roundtrip between Dallas and Houston without petrol.

By contrast, some plug-in hybrids on the horizon would require motorists to charge their cars in a wall outlet overnight and promise only 80,5km of petrol-free commute. And the popular hybrids on the road today still depend heavily on fossil fuels.

Sceptics, though, fear the claims stretch the bounds of existing technology to the point of alchemy.