The sub says it all - I’ve heard all about programs like RAMBooster and FreeRAM, and basically, I just want to know, do they work??? Or more appropriately, do they do anything noticeable? For some reason the idea of eliminating massive chunks of active memory 128 MBs at a time just seems a little scary, and I don’t want to start messing with this sort of stuff unless I know it will work.
I use my laptop for everything from gaming to word processing to photo-editing, and I have 256 MB of RAM installed.
I’ve used those programs before. (FreeRAM to be exact). They seem to work in that they do free up RAM. The problem is that the RAM fills back up very quickly. The reason the RAM is full in the first place is because you don’t have enough. Once you clear it out it quickly gets filled up again. It you want to have a perfomance bost and less hard drive activity (virtual memory usage) then just get a memory upgrade.
No, they don’t work. On any modern OS, such as Windows 2000 or XP, the memory management is smart enough that RAM optimizers are useless. Even on Windows 98, they’re not going to provide any significant benefit. There’s no danger, however, the program just artificially uses a large amount of RAM, forcing the OS to dump the rest into virtual memory, thus “freeing” a large chunk of RAM. Your system will be slowed to a crawl for another 30 seconds as necessary data is moved BACK from virtual memory to RAM, thus reducing any use they have for you. I agree with brainchild786 that if you’re actually short on RAM, your best bet is to just buy more RAM.
Win 95/98/ME virtual memory is broken in the first place, since it swaps out entire processes instead of memory pages. Nothing added on top of that will make it suck any less. WinXP has proper paging, but from what I’ve heard, it also manages swapping prety well on its own.
The sort of utility Alereon is talking about provides no benefits at all - as he points out, it will actually increase swapping, which is the absolute slowest part of any virtual memory implementation. However, there are (or have been) apparently a few utilities that work of the principle of RAM compression - they compress page images to a smaller area of RAM and uncompress them on demand, which is faster that paging to disk. I have no experience with any of these however - I’ve only heard general discussion on the subject.
Many modern OSes will use most of the available RAM even with very few programs loaded - it is there to be used, after all, which is presumably why you wanted to buy it. Linux, for instance, will by default use slack RAM to cache disk reads (and read ahead) for faster access. You can also do things like setting up symlinks or your /tmp directory on a filesytem in RAM. High memory usage is not a bad thing, unless it’s a symptom of inefficiency.
RAM Doubler from Connectix worked extremely well under MacOS 7 and 8, but RAM has been so cheap in the modern era that everyone I know has disabled it. (And disabled Virtual Memory entirely under MacOS any versions prior to X).
I’m surprised anyone is still using them. If you want more RAM, why not just buy it? You can max out any consumer machine for less than it costs to buy Microsoft Office. Drop a gig and a half in and restart.
I tried a free trial of MemTurbo on a W98SE machine. It showed stats displaying what it was doing, and I believe it could have really been doing it, but I noticed absolutely zero practical advantage. The only thing I noticed is that applications ran slower for the time it took for MemTurbo to clean up memory.
I am trying to eliminate the cause of the machine crashing about once per day, even if the only thing running is a screen saver, and memory does not appear to be the problem.
I tried a free memory manager and it caused my registry to be corrupted. All I can say is beware. I can’t remember the name of program so I just avoid all of them now.