My friend harps on about a shareware/freeware program he's downloaded that automatically frees up memory whenever it goes above a certain point. I always thought that memory automatically freed itself up if it was not being used, or was automatically used by another process if the original process was terminated.
Are these MemBooster/MemClear/RamBuster programs actually worthwhile, or are they the computing equivalent of snake oil?
2007-07-06 01:14:30 · 3 answers · asked by colonel_pantucci 1 in Computers & Internet ➔ Software
Windows fragments it's memory, a reboot frees up much more memory and defragments the ram also, the booster programs will help very little, and cannot defragment the RAM.
2007-07-06 01:24:19 · answer #1 · answered by Feeling Mutual 7 · 0⤊ 0⤋
As Microsoft and its Windows matures (20 is youngster for a commercial OS like Windows) those programs you mention taking on a snake oil profile, because Microsoft doesn't do very through technical testing and Windows does have such memory leaky bug.
DOS-based consumer-grade Windows used to need to restart every few hours, XP is NT-derived so it is better in that regard.
2007-07-06 01:23:38 · answer #2 · answered by Andy T 7 · 0⤊ 0⤋
it's snake oil.
you are forcing your computer to work off the hard disk even MORE often than before. Ask anyone what the major bottleneck is in modern computing: the hard drive. The best use of memory, is to utilize all of it that is available. Programs that constantly flush the ram are keeping the ram from doing its intended job: to temporarily store active program files for faster access.
2007-07-06 01:30:36 · answer #3 · answered by hellotman16 4 · 0⤊ 0⤋