More Awesome Than You!

I have searched and I can't find the thread.... I read a thread where someone had missing textures on their sim's clothes (thus this thread's title...) and I had the same problem. Even with Maxian families wearing default clothes. It only happened occasionally though. Like when I'd been playing a long long time. So I figured it was RAM, recalled hearing something about a memory leak, and saved frequently so if the issue came and bothered me I could exit and reboot the computer. I also had an issue where when visiting another lot the load screen didn't have the icons on the background, just showed the car for a min or two.
When I read that thread I thought, hey, I'll try reinstalling and setting the whole folder to read only (before I just had objects packages read only).
Didn't work. It was memory. Apparently a gig of Ram and 256 on my vid card isn't enough. What is a memory leak anyway? The concept doesn't make sense to me, something that keeps RAM from refreshing?

Yea, that's part of it.  A memory leak occurs when an application grabs memory to use, and then doesn't release it when it's done with it.  Worse, it doesn't reuse that block of memory, and just grabs another block when it needs more memory, and so on.  Eventually, it uses up all the available RAM, causing the system to slow down as it starts paging, or crashing the app or system completely.

When I used to work at a software firm about 5 years ago the techies always advised me to restart Windows before running something new (like switching from one proggy to another, if either was a memory hog) as Windows tends to hog things a bit too.  Is this still true? 

To a degree it is.  I use Cacheman, which is pretty darn good at freeing memory.  http://www.outertech.com/

I've used Cacheman and WinMen Optimizer, and WinMem seems to run more seamlessly, use fewer resources, and free up more mem for me. Both, however, are good.

Only annoyance is that there's a three digit limit on mem available setting, not four.