E238 CA: Trouble Shooting 2006 Feeding and Care of Your Computer

Feeding and Care of Your Computer by P C SURGEON Source: Mundaring Magazine September 2004: 32

A MOST USEFUL TOOL One of my most useful software tools is Freemem. It frees up Random Access Memory (RAM) captured by other programs, but not released after use. Think of RAM as volatile, short-term, temporary, scratchpad memory that is lost when the PC's power is switched off. Windows uses much RAM whilst loading but fails to release it all after finally revealing the desktop. You now have less available RAM to run your applications. Meanwhile, Windows runs stuff in the background—some is vital, some is not. The result is even less RAM available. All applications have programming errors. Some you see; some you don't. As part of the errors, many applications also fail to free up all the RAM they used, when you quit the program. Now you have still less available. BUT IT GETS WORSE Many programs use large libraries of repetitive routines that the program can dip into to save time. (DLL files in particular). Some libraries are huge and consume heaps of memory.

Take a library whith, say, 100 functions in it. The library is loaded just to provide two or three functions but Windows reserves RAM as if your application would use all 100 functions. Windows is not smart enough to really detect which files are necessary to hold in RAM and which not. Your PC with only 64 MB of RAM might use around 30 or 40 MB to cache files from the hard disk. Only half or less than half is left for running applicaitons and the operating system. Without this file caching, as it's called, your PC would be extremely slow. But your PC becomes slower and slower as there's less and less available, freed-up RAM. Talk about a rock and a hard place. Enter Freemem, a brilliant program. At a glance, you can see how much RAM is available at any moment. With a couple of keystrokes, Freemem will release back to you much of that captured RAM. You can do this on-the-fly.