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Anyway to refresh RAM without re-booting?

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Not all running programs report to the task manager. Hence not showing up. short of virus/spyware I would just turn off unused/unecessary services.

What your asking is just a band-aid fix to a bigger problem.
 
Originally posted by: RelaxTheMind
Originally posted by: Nothinman
Not all running programs report to the task manager.
Click to expand...

Yes they do, unless you've got a rootkit on your machine hiding them.
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exactly

edit: a lot of people either dont like being told that or have no idea what your talking about.
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They probably also don't realize that the VM Size column is more informative than the Mem Usage column.
 
This is what I do to do a quick clean up. I open task manager, kill explorer.exe, then reload explorer.exe from file/new task . This would force reloading explorer.exe, along with the registry. Should clear the memory up some, unless the faulty program is still running.
 
This is what I do to do a quick clean up. I open task manager, kill explorer.exe, then reload explorer.exe from file/new task . This would force reloading explorer.exe, along with the registry. Should clear the memory up some, unless the faulty program is still running.
Click to expand...

That doesn't reload the registry, the registry is open from the time the OS boots to the time you shut it down. Explorer just uses the registry like any other application.
 
Originally posted by: manly
As MrChad said, log out and log back in. IMO, Windows is still not as efficient as UNIX in memory management, as evidenced by this issue.
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Logic from a mind like a beartrap. 😛

A leaky app/driver has nothing to do with the efficiency of Windows memory management and the root cause of this "issue" has not been determined so there is not really evidence of anything.




MrChad had the answer here guys.


If your machine starts dogging after a bit, use perfmon, task manager, poolmon yada yada to sort out what is leaking memory (or handles or whatever resource it may be).

There is no magic "flush" button.

 
Originally posted by: Smilin
Originally posted by: manly
As MrChad said, log out and log back in. IMO, Windows is still not as efficient as UNIX in memory management, as evidenced by this issue.
Click to expand...

Logic from a mind like a beartrap. 😛

A leaky app/driver has nothing to do with the efficiency of Windows memory management and the root cause of this "issue" has not been determined so there is not really evidence of anything.




MrChad had the answer here guys.


If your machine starts dogging after a bit, use perfmon, task manager, poolmon yada yada to sort out what is leaking memory (or handles or whatever resource it may be).

There is no magic "flush" button.
Click to expand...
Please, if one uses Windows XP and UNIX on a regular basis, he probably agrees UNIX has had more effective memory caching for much longer than Windows and still does today. I agree that the apps have something to do with it, but any desktop platform would suffer from that problem.

I tend to agree with what savvy said; close down your apps (and restart the necessary ones) and you don't necessarily reduce the amount of swapping or improve responsiveness.
 
Theres some software that will 'dump' your ram and do a refresh on it. I haven't really messed w/ it lately cause i run 2GiG so theres never any need. But GOOGLE some proggies, i used FreeRAM for awhile it worked pretty well. The best one though was for my Win98 machine, but i can't recall the name of it. =/
 
Theres some software that will 'dump' your ram and do a refresh on it. I haven't really messed w/ it lately cause i run 2GiG so theres never any need. But GOOGLE some proggies, i used FreeRAM for awhile it worked pretty well. The best one though was for my Win98 machine, but i can't recall the name of it. =/
Click to expand...

Please read the entire thread before posting.
 
Originally posted by: Nothinman
This is what I do to do a quick clean up. I open task manager, kill explorer.exe, then reload explorer.exe from file/new task . This would force reloading explorer.exe, along with the registry. Should clear the memory up some, unless the faulty program is still running.
Click to expand...

That doesn't reload the registry, the registry is open from the time the OS boots to the time you shut it down. Explorer just uses the registry like any other application.
Click to expand...


Registry does get reloaded when explorer.exe reloads. That is why I never reboot the box when I install a program, I just kill explorer.exe and reload that and voila, all registry changes are current.


 
Registry does get reloaded when explorer.exe reloads. That is why I never reboot the box when I install a program, I just kill explorer.exe and reload that and voila, all registry changes are current.
Click to expand...

Registry changes are always current. Please explain why you think that killing explorer reloads the registry.
 
I think he means it reloads the registry for the Explorer shell (Explorer rereads its config rather), but that's sort of a given. You kill any app and the next time it starts it'll read the registry (if that's when it usually does). Most apps don't monitor the registry in real-time for changes, even if Windows updates the registry immediately.
 
well, if youre using apps like CS2, Excel, and 5 IE browsers all at the same time, I wouldn't be surprised to see a bit of lag after a while. Isn't CS2 a huge memory hog anyway? How's the performance when you run just CS2 without Excel (i am assuming Office 2003 which also seems to be a huge resource hog) If you see a noticeable difference in speed with only one of the three apps running then maybe you need more ram?
 
Originally posted by: sdifox
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Registry does get reloaded when explorer.exe reloads. That is why I never reboot the box when I install a program, I just kill explorer.exe and reload that and voila, all registry changes are current.
[/quote]

It does not work this way at all. Reloading explorer will simply cause explorer.exe to read any necessary settings from the registry for itself. The rest of the system and your current user session will be untouched by this.

If you are doing this in response to being prompted for a reboot after an install then you are running a very real risk of hosing your system.

Why components prompt for a reboot:
1. So startup items can get loaded (run & runonce keys in registry, startup folder etc.)
2. Because a file was in use so the pendingfilerename registry key was populated, thereby allowing smss.exe to handle the file swap during the next reboot before it goes in use again.

 
Why components prompt for a reboot:
1. So startup items can get loaded (run & runonce keys in registry, startup folder etc.)
2. Because a file was in use so the pendingfilerename registry key was populated, thereby allowing smss.exe to handle the file swap during the next reboot before it goes in use again.
Click to expand...

You forgot:

3. The developer doesn't know any better so he just checked "Reboot" in the InstallShield creator.
 
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