Previously known as "Clean MemXP" has been here a few times before

to read the comments from earlier giveaways:

http://www.giveawayoftheday.com/clean-memxp-94/
http://www.giveawayoftheday.com/clean-memxp-9-2/
http://www.giveawayoftheday.com/clean-memxp/

and to follow on from the past 3 giveaways - can anyone (including anyone from FOTIS) explain exactly how this program defragments RAM - and why they believe it is necessary on XP or Vista?

The FOTIS explanation never gets more technical or descriptive than "Defrag Physical Memory when Memory reaches a limit". C'mon FOTIS... be the first to explain to everyone exactly how a memory 'defragger' works and how you have worked out how to do it better than all the others who also sell a defragger or an optimizer with some blinking lights and a flashing graph to dazzle, confuse and impress the less technically endowed.

I'm not convinced (I never have been). The best I have seen is the freeware Cleanmem from PCWinTech. Doesn't look pretty, and it doesn't claim to defrag - but does a better job than anything else I have seen to date. http://pcwintech.com/node/145

BuBBy  –  15 years ago  –  ¿Te ha parecido útil este comentario? si | no (+160)

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You can do all of this for free.

Right click desktop, create short cut input 'C:\Windows\System32\perfmon.msc' without quotes into 'type the location of this item', then hit next and name it 'Performance Monitor' without quotes and hit finish.

Nice icon appears on your desktop and if you want information then double click it.

Lee  –  15 years ago  –  ¿Te ha parecido útil este comentario? si | no (+149)

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Useless knowledge story mode on:
For those that asked, Memory defrag has been around for a LONG time; dating back to Unix. What it does is picks up everything that is scattered around and drops it all back in line together. While most "average" users wouldn't notice or even have a use for it; I have 4 computers with over 8Gigs Ram installed.
Think of this, you open up a firefox and visit a few of those eye-candy web pages that people like BuBBy apparently like with tons of flash nonsense. Then you open up adobe acrobat and start batch converting PDF files to text. You load up Snood Solitaire for a few games, copy a video and some MP3s over to another hard drive, sync your media player to iTunes, and what not. Then you read some mail in Thunderbird. You see a message that reminds you that you have yet to see that new movie in NetFlix so you load up IE and click on over to the view page and load up that film. You notice it's a little bit choppy so you look at the task bar and figure out, oops, Firefox still has 12 flash pages loaded and close it. You close iTunes, Snood, and everything else beside Adobe and IE.
You just created a ton of holes in your ram. Defrag moves it all back to the beginning of chip 1.

Only two types of users will ever benefit from Mem DF, and one is questionable. Those on old, and I do refer to old (eg pre-pentium II) systems with infinitesimal amounts of of ram just scraping by to begin with, and those with bleeding-edge ultra uber machines with gargantuan amounts of ram. XP and Vista BOTH allocate memory based on what's available at the time a program/service/task is started. In reality the first programs to start can, in theory, use up to 50% of what you have or more.

I've seen Acrobat use well over 6Gbs just converting PDF files back to text. OmniPage can use in the range of 12Gbs running advanced deep OCR scans. UltraVideoConverter, on my most powerful system routinely uses in the neighbourhood 15 or 16 Gbs when running alone, loading the entire file into the memory for faster access when converting.

However, on multicore systems with multithreading programs, defraging RAM can be detrimental, especially on Vista and newer versions of Linux platforms, which will allocate memory across different chips to maintain speed and stability. In cases like this you can SLOW your system by doing a defrag, or even crash it.
ALSO: if the defrag function kicks in without regard at a set point of SIZE and not ACTIVITY as it does with this program, you can risk corruption or or LOSS of data. Such cases: defragmenting a large hard drive on a system with lots of memory, converting/transcoding video, running OCR on large files.... In such cases where the memory is being ACTUALLY ACTIVELY USED you risk loosing what ever is in the "next" string of data during a move.

For those on old systems, with 256Mbs or less, yes, defrag is useful.
For most everyone else, you're probably still too slow to notice it.
For those with more than, say, 8Gbs, you probably could create a minor prominence boost but in a case where you would notice a difference you're probably at risk of dumping data as well, negating any benefit.
Take it for what you will. =)

lostinlodos  –  15 years ago  –  ¿Te ha parecido útil este comentario? si | no (+100)

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So this is a just a fancy version of Windows Task Manager :]

Chip  –  15 years ago  –  ¿Te ha parecido útil este comentario? si | no (+43)

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While the coding for this is somewhat primitive and I'm not fond of the UI, if you don't have a similar application/process/performance monitoring tool, this is OK. As the author has improved this, I'm not going to bash it. The values I checked appeared to be OK, but I didn't check everything. You can turn off the stuff which you don't want, and I strongly recommend turning off the memory optimization junk. Note that there are two tabs at the bottom of the Options panel.

Vista users should set the program's Properties, Compatibility, to Run as an Administrator, otherwise, it will give you a message that you need to do so and hang. Installation was moderately clean, putting a file into System32, and trying to obfuscate its registration information by putting it in the wrong registry key (I hate that). Coding is a bit primitive, doing some things by calling command routines and filtering the results. The Help is primitive and a bit incomplete, but useable.

#7, Hans, while you can leave Clean MemXP installed (but I wouldn't use both), you might as well uninstall it, as SysResources Manager is the same program, but with some fixes and probably some more features.

As I have other, better, tools, such as AnVir (commercial), the Vista Reliability and Performance Monitor, and the free Microsoft Sysinternals Process Monitor, Process Explorer, and AutoRuns (not to mention lesser tools such as Task Manager, Windows Defender, MSConfig, Administrative Tools, etc.), I won't be using this.

Fubar  –  15 years ago  –  ¿Te ha parecido útil este comentario? si | no (+41)

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