Wondering about app called Freeram XP

[antyler]

Does FreeRam XP actually clear up memory and boost performance? or is it simply good for showing how much ram you have? I like this program because it shows how much memory is sitting there. Is there a program that only shows this but doesnt free any ram?

 

[igowerf]

No. This kind of software actually hurts performance. It's been discussed before.

http://mywebpages.comcast.net/SupportCD/XPMyths.html
Scroll down to the RAM deframenter section.

 

[WobbleWobble]

Originally posted by: igowerf
No. This kind of software actually hurts performance. It's been discussed before.

http://mywebpages.comcast.net/SupportCD/XPMyths.html
Scroll down to the RAM deframenter section.

Good site!

 

[Nothinman]

Anything running purely in userland can not affect the allocation of physical memory beyond asking to be allocated a chunk of memory for itself. And all that most of the memory "optimizers" do is just request a huge chunk of memory so that the OS has to free memory for it, this causes whatever's currently in memory to be flushed to disk. Then the "optimizer" frees the memory and makes you think it just gained you a ton of free memory when all it ended up doing was clearing out any caching the OS was doing thus making it page all of that data back in as you start running other things again.

As stupid as MS' marketing department may make them look, they really do employ some of the smartest programmers in the world and I would wager that all of them understand memory management better than anyone writing 10K "optimizer" program in VB.

 

[shortylickens]

Originally posted by: Nothinman
Anything running purely in userland can not affect the allocation of physical memory beyond asking to be allocated a chunk of memory for itself. And all that most of the memory "optimizers" do is just request a huge chunk of memory so that the OS has to free memory for it, this causes whatever's currently in memory to be flushed to disk. Then the "optimizer" frees the memory and makes you think it just gained you a ton of free memory when all it ended up doing was clearing out any caching the OS was doing thus making it page all of that data back in as you start running other things again.

As stupid as MS' marketing department may make them look, they really do employ some of the smartest programmers in the world and I would wager that all of them understand memory management better than anyone writing 10K "optimizer" program in VB.

Well spoken.

Back in the days of 95,98 and ME, windows was pretty bad about allowing stuff to clog up your system over time. Running a memory cleaner was actually a decent way to help your system.
BUT NOT EVERY HOUR, like many of them defaulted to.
Only every couple of days, when your background was really clogged up.
And lets be honest, if its only once a week or so, wouldnt it be better to simply restart?

 

[Nothinman]

Even in Win9X a memory cleaner couldn't do anything more than an excessive allocation unless it had a kernel level driver component and that would make me even less willing to install it because I doubt the people who wrote it understand how Windows manages memory as well as MS' own developers.

 

[antyler]

Well it had me fooled. I mainly used the computer to just surf the web, and this program was running like every ten-twenty minutes. Probably just slowing everything down.

 

[Evander]

On a related topic, does Cacheman actually boost performance in XP? It's listed somewhere on that page:
http://mywebpages.comcast.net/SupportCD/OptimizeXP.html
as being beneficial, but thought I'd ask here for the inside scoop