Cleanmem

There are a lot of utilities available to "manage" windows memory. Some are free. Some cost quite a bit of money.  Most are worse than useless as they  "manage" memory by allocating a huge block of memory. This forces Windows to write most of the programs and data you are actually using to the swap file on your slow (compared to your system's memory) hard drive. Theses programs then free the huge block of memory they allocated which provides you with much more free memory. This process is slow and worse, it will always make your system slower as when you start doing anything, Windows has to reload whatever you were doing back into memory from the swap file on your hard drive. In other words, while most windows memory managers do free up memory they actually slow your system down when they do so.

If you have a lot of memory on your system (over 1 gig for XP, over 2 gigs for Vista) you probably don't need to worry about free memory to begin with. While Windows does not allocate memory as efficiently as Linux does, it you have enough memory you will seldom, if ever, notice.

If you do not have a lot of memory on your system and want to try a memory manager to see if it helps your system, I have found one memory manager, Cleanmem, that is designed intelligently. It frees memory by using a standard Windows OS system call that tells a program to free all memory that it holding but not currently using. When it runs, it makes a lists of all programs running and sends each program this command. In a second or two, it has freed any memory not actually in use and it has not forced anything to be written to the swap file.

Better yet, Cleanmem does not sit in your system tray where it takes up memory and other system resources. Instead, the Cleanmem install sets Windows Scheduler to run Cleanmem every 30 minutes. While Cleanmem works well out of the box, you can exclude certain programs from having their memory freed by adding them to a text file. You can also stop Cleanmen from clearing the file cache by adding "file cache" to this text file. (Clearing the file cache every 30 minutes probably will slow things down).

Chances are you really don't need a memory manager, but if you want to try one Cleanmem is the only one I've seen that behaves in an intelligent manner and might -- on some systems -- actually help more than it hurts. Best of all, it's free.

Operating System: Windows 2000, XP, 2003, Vista, 2008, & Win7 (32bit & 64bit)
Price: Free
Web Site: http://www.pcwintech.com/cleanmem