Someone or
something that attacks an otherwise healthy computer and sucks it dry of its
life-sustaining RAM. Sometimes an actual
program you deliberately ran can act as a
rampire, for example,
IE,
Netscape,
M$ Office, and (sad to say) the version of
StarOffice that I'm using. Other times it's the little
shitlets that run as
daemons or
startup items or
menu bar icons or whatever. Ominously, some
rampires are
viruses,
worms, and
trojans.
BackOrifice and
ILOVEYOU are famous examples. A common characteristic of
rampires is that they don't die easy. Killing them merely turns them into
zombie processes that continue to gorge themselves on your system's resources
from beyond the grave.
Rebooting your system may help, but they'll sink their
teeth right back in upon
startup. Some of the more fanatical users protect their systems with the chop-n-cauterize method: they install the absolute minimum of features, and
reformat their drives for good measure about once a month. The rest just keep buying more RAM. Much like the
human race has responded to the increasing numbers of
vampires living among us by evolving to have 20% more blood. See:
high blood pressure. See also:
bizzare humor inspired by
sleep deprivation,
caffeine poisoning, and
self neglect.
Beware, rampires sometimes masquerade as regular humans who physcially remove RAM from other computers and put it in their own. Their preferred cover identity is that of tech support people. Sure. Mind if I peek behind that cubicle wall? A-hah! Just as I suspected. A vast pile of PC corpses, sucked completely dry of their components. With an old yet strangely young P166 on his desktop with more memory than any natural god-fearing P166 should have. To the pits of hell with you, demonspawn!
Oh, almost forgot: you can purge the
rampires from your system by driving a
wooden stake through it. Or driving a
crucifix through it. Or driving
damn near anything through it. This will almost certainly
void the warranty, however.