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*4@3
                          WHY IS SOFTMEM SO POPULAR?
*3]5@2
                               by Steve / V12-PD
*1]1@1

As  a  PD  library  owner  for  over 2 years now, I notice how low the level of
service is getting in this area.  It's frightening to say it, I know, but after
lots  of  swapping and buying of PD from other libraries, you soon realise just
how much of the stuff they sell is faulty or garbage.

Take  SoftMem  for  instance,  muted  in  all the mags in ads from a well-known
library,  guaranteeing  to double your memory.  Well, we had it tested here and
here's what it did.

On a 6 Meg unaccel.  1200, when installed, SoftMem offers the ability to double
both  Fast  and Chip.  Fine, we thought, install away Mr, and do your best.....
After  installing, it reported that we now owned a 12 Meg beast with 4 Meg Chip
and  8 Meg Fast!  Hurrah, we thought as we saw the title bar with such numbers,
and,  before a proper test, we used a few Ram Viewers to see if it was just the
titlebar  it  had  fooled.   Filemaster,  SysInfo,  AWS  and several others all
reported  we  had  12  Meg.   Double  Hurrah and Huzzah, we cried!  So, we went
merrily off to test it.  Personal Paint did, oddly, seem to load in pictures of
a  slightly  larger  size (400K GIF's while multitasking) than normal, although
the  speed  was  horrendous.   Ah  well, can't have everything, we shrugged, at
least it looks like it works....  But then came Prograb's software.

Prograb  did  exactly  the  opposite.   On a little 6 Meg system it can usually
handle  15  colour  pics  in animation mode.  With SoftMem, it handles a mighty
6!!!  Vidi 24rt Pro handles about 120, 16 shade, B+W pics.  With SoftMem it now
has  a  huge...   err...  32....  So, with hands shrugged down and walking like
penguins,  we  got  V12's  programming guru, Mike, to pull it apart and tell us
what on earth it actually ]5WAS]1 doing.

He  laughed.   He  chortled.  He wheezed.  Apparently all SoftMem does is stick
the  number  of bytes in RAM available up, but puts the fake bytes "underneath"
the  real ones.  Hence when you're using it, it still ticks off the same amount
of  RAM  and leaves a bigger number.  But most of what you have left is totally
useless.  As if he intentionally wanted to make us look foolish, he then showed
us  a  simple  file dump into the 6 Meg of RAM.  4.6 Meg of pics later, and the
RAM disk, with it's requester saying nearly 7 Meg was available, came up ]3FULL]1.

I,  therefore,  am  writing  this  article  to warn everyone reading ]5NOT]1 to buy
SoftMem.   It  is  a  total fake and doesn't work in the slightest.  In fact it
slows  your system down and takes ]5AWAY]1 ½ a meg to actually run!!!  Whatever the
adverts say, SoftMem is rubbish, and a free copy is available to anyone to test
it  if they don't believe me.  Even worse, our system, because of fiddling with
the RAM vectors, came up suspecting a virus after it was removed!  Keep further
away from this than if you were covered in honey at a killer bee festival....
*4@7
                             YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED!
*1@3
[And  just to reinforce the argument that some PD libraries don't properly test
what  software  they  supply,  an article explaining that SoftMem is a fake has
appeared  in  both  Grapevine  and  Shareworld  (and probably quite a few other
mags).  Surely the libraries concerned would have noticed the article(s) by now
if they had properly tested the software in their diskmag collection.  zYLAX!]