what features are most commonly used such as the program vendor or the local it department may also be available the agent has been illustrated as being separate from the operating system those skilled in the art will appreciate that an agent according to the invention could also be incorporated into the operating system the instructions for the agent may be located on non volatile storage e g a disk and copied into ram or the instructions could be stored in non volatile solid state memory in the same hardware as the storage 105 for convenience in the following claims the term u201c data u201d will be used generally to cover both items such as the text in a word processor or the numbers in a spreadsheet and also the instructions that are part of an application program i e the agent may store program segments and or text or numbers in the temporary storage it should be noted that this invention is not a ram disk though it may make use of a ram disk for the non rotating storage the technology for ram disks in which a portion of ram is set up to emulate the structure of a disk has been around for many years and is well understood the non rotating storage 105 is preferably the storage in the system that consumes the least power alternatives to ram are a network storage device an san storage area network device organic memory eeprom flash memory and others since the main function of the invention is saving power the initial cost of the components in the storage 105 will weigh less in the mind of the user than the benefits of longer battery life optionally the.