I have a pc with way less RAM than it should so I'm hoping to help alleviate that problem by switching to a portable version of antivirus so I'm wondering: do portable apps run directly out of the ram of the flash drive or do they still use ABOUT the same amount of the the pc's system ram? (I.e. does using the portable version free up ram or just harddrive space?) Thanks for any help.
A portable version of an app will use about the same amount of RAM as the regular version, so this approach won't help in your situation.
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