Hi Jeff,
There's several things you can do to reduce Opera memory usage. You'll want to experiment with these, and remember the settings you've changed, so you can switch them back on in the event that a website or web app stops working as a result of the setting change. Also, you can pick and choose which memory settings you want to change - you don't have to do all of them. They all save a different amount of Opera memory, and even making a couple of them should make a difference and help you run more Opera tabs at once without slowing down your PC.
Reducing Opera Memory Usage
- The first thing you'll want to do is adjust the appearance of Opera. You can turn off some fancy graphics settings to save memory. Click on the main Opera icon in upper left, and then select "Appearance" (or use the Shift + F12 keys). Change the "Opera Standard" skin to "Windows Native Skin."
- In the same menu, deselect "Enable special effects". Hit OK to save your changes.
- Next, open a blank tab and type the following in the Opera address bar:
opera:config#UserPrefs. This will let you visit the main Opera configuration page, where you can adjust all kinds of settings (you may even find some other ones that you want to tweak, independent of the memory settings). - Use Ctrl + F (Find) to locate the following settings and disable them:
- AutomaticRAMCache
- Bittorent support
- Cache > Empty cache on exit
- Favicons (the little icons that appear in the tabs to identify web pages)
- Java
- Opera Sync
- Page Index
- Quicktime (this will only show up if installed)
- Smooth Scrolling
- Speed Dial
- Thumbnails
- Wand
