Really, you don't want to randomly waste cpu cycles for nothing, like pre-decompresssing video. It just increases the power usage and heat of the computer. It w

Really, you don't want to randomly waste cpu cycles for nothing, like pre-decompresssing video. It just increases the power usage and heat of the computer. It would also make it harder to skip, since the program needs to finish the portion it is working on. One thing people often don't realise is there isn't really 'wasted' RAM, your OS usually uses the rest to cache things, especially files. File caching can greatly speed up disc reads and writes. (The following only applies to linux, I'm not sure about other OS's; all three have very different memory models). When memory is getting high, a few things can happen (depending on whether you have swap). The file cache is preferentially cleared first, but swapping pages to disc is also considered readily. An interesting thing is that swapped pages aren't deleted from swap straight away, only if they are modified (so swap usually doesn't decrease in size). There is also the Out Of Memory killer, which can kill applications using too much memory. It really is an interesting area. You can read more from this page http://tldp.org/LDP/tlk/mm/memory.html http://tldp.org/LDP/tlk/mm/memory.html. Just remember all OS's are different.