There are many programs on the market that promise to clean up memory or free more memory. It began in 1998, with the program RamCharger 2.0, which was supposed to defragment memory and thereby speeding up Windows. The German magazine c't has tested the program and could find no benefit. Even today's RAM optimizers are often ineffective. They usually operate on the same principle: the program demands as much memory as possible from Windows and thereby displaces other programs from memory. Normally these programs are then swapped to disk, because of memory shortage, the swap file is used. But hard drives are more than 100 times slower than RAM, so the outsourced programs are drastically slowed down. The memory optimizer now frees its own large memory area and suddenly the system has more memory available than before - with the disadvantage that the other running programs have been swapped out to disk and then run much slower. Windows will now realize that memory is free again and move the programs back into memory. And how does this all help? Actually nothing, except that Windows displays more free memory, but for only a short time.
There are few positive exceptions among memory optimizers. For example, our tools
WinSpeedUp and
WinLube use a different method to free memory. They rely on Windows-internal data structures that are not officially documented by Microsoft. They request Windows to re-calculate the memory area of each program, thus releasing memory areas which were not used for a long time. This means that programs will not be swapped out to disk and slowed down. However, it can not be predicted well, how much memory can be released, which depends on the used programs. It can therefore not be determined in advance how much memory is being freed. This option is offered by the memory optimizers of the ineffective category. It only determines the size of memory that those "optimizers" claim and immediately release.
There are hundreds of memory optimizers on the market, but few provide what they promise. Among the exceptions there are our tools to help you free memory purposefully.
