RAM Cleaner
 

I leave my computer on most of the day. Towards the end of the day my rig starts to slow down and if I restart it eveything goes back to normal. I am assuming that my RAM is getting "clogged" or "full of junk." Does anyone know of a program that can wipe your RAM clean? Just wondering. Thanks

I'm quite curious as to if there's a way as well (Other than using linux). I can usually go for about 3 weeks without a reboot. Most of the time I reboot before compressing a video, or before playing some games (Havent had to recently since my upgrade). I don't really see a big problem with a small 30 second reboot though.

A nice bit of info you could give us is your comp specs, I've seen way too many people using 256/128mb sdr using winXP, and they wonder why they're computer isnt running "fast".

If you're using some version of Windows XP or 2000, you can check out the Task Manager. Do this by hitting CTRL-ALT-DEL (and, depending on what version of Windows you're using, you might have to click the Task Manager button). An important thing to check out is the Processes tab. See what's running. If you're not sure what a particular process is/does, google it and see if you can figure out what it is. If its something you don't want/need running, terminate it. Also, sort the process by memory and cpu usuage too see if one particular process is slowing things down. You can't hurt too much by terminating processes.... nothing a restart won't fix.

If you notice that there's things that always run when you start Windows that you don't want running, check out the MSCONFIG utility (Start->Run->msconfig). Sort through the Services and Startup tab and uncheck things you don't want to start when Windows loads.

Hope that helps.

I used to use this waaaaay back in the day on win95 with 16mb o'ram

It seemed like it worked a bit but the more I think about it now, how much resources does it tie up itself?

check it out here

The issue with Windows is not "clogging RAM", but memory leaks. Windows is notorious for closing applications, then not reallocating the used memory back to the pool. The only way to solve this is a reboot.

the memturbo application also supposedly takes care of mem leaks by reallocating the ram back from unused apps

I use Cacheman, which is freeware and seems to work well.

MaxMem from www.analogx.com is what I use,
it too is freeware, and I have always been a big fan of his progs.

I was the first one to post a mem manager program here, and i see that everyone has their faves they use(d), my question is as stated above, how much mem do these "friendly" programs use on their own?

more likely your memory is clogging with dll's and disk cache, theres a setting in xp i believe exposed by tweakui that allows dll flush on application close.

one of the load time optimizations OS'es use is to keep shared libraries in memory after the application that needed it closes, that way if you load it again its faster, same for another app using the same dll, just as most caches work.

Windows 9X was notorious for resource leaks, but XP is based on NT's memory model, which does not suffer the same way, an app that fails to free a memory block allocated will be freed by the OS at application close.

Any program specific memory leaks are bad when it happens while the program is running, same it allocates 1K every few seconds, but never frees it, and runs for an hour, all that memory is lost, nearly all OS's can do zip about that, but after the program closes the memory is returned to the OS, except in some very specific cases.

the resource kit contains an aggressive memory flusher called clearmem, analogx's maxmem has a similar setting.

I also use CacheMan and highly recommend it.

It uses up 2MB of RAM itself, 0% CPU, and does an excellent job at reallocating memory lost through leaks in programs, etc.

Furthermore, Cacheman allows you to tweak a lot of the OS memory and file table settings, such as the one about flushing dlls.

I use this as well. AnalogX has a lot of cool little programs. They're free, small and do exactly what they say they will.

I usually use Ramfree 128. It seems to work pretty well for my needs.

http://www.tweak3d.net/files/ramfree128.exe