Every time you open a computer catalog, you find that parts have become faster and cheaper. Memory prices have fallen to a ridiculous level, making possible new ways of computing that were unthinkable in the past. A perfect example is the use of a RAM drive on mainstream desktop PCs. And after looking at SuperSpeed RamDisk XP Professional ($99.95 direct), we were tantalized by the possibilities.

A RAM drive is a portion of system memory that is set up to behave like a hard drive. To the OS, a RAM drive looks like just another drive volume. And a RAM drive will always be faster than a mechanical hard drive. Under a conventional PC design, excess memory lets you run more applications without swapping files to the hard drive, but each application does not necessarily run any faster.

Enter RamDisk, which can set up a large chunk of the memory as a drive. The size is limited only by the amount of memory in your PC. You can install an entire application into a RamDisk drive volume and run the application at the speed of memory. Imagine playing a 3-D game without the stutter that occurs when the texture data for the new scene is loaded. RamDisk can also enhance battery life in laptops, since the power-hungry hard drive is invoked less frequently.

To test RamDisk's speed, we ran our Disk WinMark 99 test, which measures the drive performance in running real applications. RamDisk accessed data more than ten times faster than the 7,200-rpm hard drive in our test system. In Photoshop, the RamDisk was 40 times faster.

Installing and running applications on RamDisk requires some care. The content on RamDisk's drive must be backed up before shutting off the system, because RamDisk is set up on a volatile memory that will not persist when the system is off. RamDisk provides a one-button backup feature, which backs up the content on a RamDisk drive to a designated directory on the hard drive. When the PC is rebooted, the backed-up content is reloaded onto RamDisk's drive.

If you have a frequently used application that is slowed by hard drive accesses, RamDisk and some extra memory are a worthwhile investment.