TurboMem: Does it work? Can it work? Is it real?

The August 14th issue of MDJ takes a look at TurboMem, and explains why they believe the claims made by its publisher are impossible. TurboMem was released by Mac Unicorn Software, a company that, despite its claims to the contrary, has often been suspected to be an incarnation of Gadget Software (see previous coverage).

We received an email from John Monemi, the CEO of Mac Unicorn Software, protesting the accusations launched against TurboMem in particular and his company in general. He says, in part:

"We are not Gadget Software or any Gadget children, such as Ready Software, Red and White Software and Fan Software, which is to my knowledge all the Gadget 'corporations.'

Even though it is only a v1.0, TurboMem works perfectly and is very efficient on my system. It took us 7 months to finish TurboMem; I would like people to try it. If they don't even download it, how can we convince anyone?!"

The MDJ also got this email (which originates from France, as did Gadget), and looked in more detail at the program itself. Here is an excerpt from their report:

"On its Web page, Mac Unicorn software explicitly promises that TurboMem eliminates fragmentation by relocating programs while they're still running. On the 'FAQ' page, Mac Unicorn compares TurboMem to RAM Charger, an older product that attempts to improve RAM allocation by making every program on the system share the same big partition, a valid approach with its own pros and cons. The difference is that RAM Charger actually implemented its strategy. TurboMem does not.

We see no way at all TurboMem can perform any of the tasks it advertises. It cannot replace the memory allocation system, it cannot recover RAM from other applications, it cannot do anything at all to other programs under Mac OS X [Editor's note: Mac OS X handles memory in a totally different way from OS 9, such that memory fragmentation is not even an issue.] If Mac Unicorn Software truly took seven months to debug it and believe that it really works, they're lucky to have released other software titles (like Free Space and MultiClip) that actually do work, for they don't know what they're doing. If they know it doesn't work and sell it anyway, they're committing fraud. Neither outcome speaks well of the company."