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Author Topic: OT - Are any RAM boosting programs worth my time??  (Read 2205 times)

JaredH

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OT - Are any RAM boosting programs worth my time??
« on: August 14, 2002, 06:34:41 pm »

Are there any RAM boosting/optimizing programs out there that actually work. If so which ones are better and which ones should I avoid.
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J. A. Hayslett

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Mirko

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RE:OT - Are any RAM boosting programs worth my time??
« Reply #1 on: August 14, 2002, 09:00:58 pm »

If you use Win2k or XP don't ever even try one of those programs. The default memory-handling in these OS' is best for normal use (non normal would include server like application).

If you use Win98, Win95 or WinME... update. No memory "booster" could help avoiding those resorce limits, which are bigger problems with that systems than memory fragmentation.

The most so called memory booster only try to force windows to have the free memory in one fragment. They do it by allocation a big piece of memory and freeing it shortly after allocating. That supposed to force windows to "compress" the memory. Even if that is the case... what's the use? The bottleneck in modern PCs is harddisc, bus and video cards. The memory access times are that fast, that the "jumping" between different free pieces (that's why this could be called fragmentation) doesn't matter. In fact there is no harm in such jumping between free pieces, because memory access _always_ includes such jumping (the memory is organized in blocks, so that the system always has to position itself to some border-addresses). The OS' use tables for free memory to locate such free "pages", as these pieces of memory who have to be address are called.

One more thing to those programs: If windows is forced to free up memory in bigger fragments than before, theoretical it could be a speedup. But... I guess you don't use applications who need 50MB in one piece _at once_. If application allocate "normal" memory sizes (like about 1 oder 2MBs), the fragmentation begins just after the compression from those programs.

The solution for every memory-related speed problem is: Buying new/other type of memory. I know this is not as cheap as such softwares, but in the long term you get what you pay for.

HTH.
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Matt

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RE:OT - Are any RAM boosting programs worth my time??
« Reply #2 on: August 14, 2002, 11:39:19 pm »

Yup, I'm with Mirko.

If there were simple software changes that made Windows run a lot better, they'd be built into the OS.

-Matt
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phelt

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RE:OT - Are any RAM boosting programs worth my time??
« Reply #3 on: August 15, 2002, 12:13:35 am »

I agree that RAM boosting progs are mostly hokum. I'm less sure about Matt's trust in a logical and empirical dev process in Redmond
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JaredH

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RE:OT - Are any RAM boosting programs worth my time??
« Reply #4 on: August 15, 2002, 12:50:21 am »

honestly im not sure why i even asked the question because here i sit with 1024 mb of pc2100 in my computer. It just seems as if my system doesnt take very much advantage of it. Could just be some tweaking i need to do to certain things. Oh well
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J. A. Hayslett

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nila

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RE:OT - Are any RAM boosting programs worth my time??
« Reply #5 on: August 15, 2002, 02:21:33 am »

Jared - There are alot of ways to speed up your computer.

One of the biggest things that's gonna decide is what OS your running though.

Also hard disk speeds.
You might want to consider setting up a RAID array which would speed up your hard drive reading time. It can be done pretty cheaply these days.

I just set mine up as a RAID-1 so that I get constant backup of all my data after my hard drive failure.

RAID-0 would give you a good speed increase.

Tweaking XP alot can make a HUGE amount of difference too, XP can be really fast if tweaked well (mainly to do with all the effects) or really slow if the settings are wrong for your system.
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Mirko

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RE:OT - Are any RAM boosting programs worth my time??
« Reply #6 on: August 15, 2002, 02:54:25 am »

Just one thing: Tweaking can also damage your system very seriously. Even if you consider yourself an expert, tweaking has almost always sideffects on other parts of the system. E.g. if you change the MTU to better match (a)dsl-transfers it could easily slow down your LAN.

But I agree. Turning off all visual enhancements speeds things up. You tweak away some fun, of course.
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JaredH

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RE:OT - Are any RAM boosting programs worth my time??
« Reply #7 on: August 15, 2002, 05:47:52 am »

oh ive been tweaking on my system now for 6 or 7 months, ive got the i run XPHome. Ive got the classic windows interface and ive got 99.9% of the bells and whistles disabled. To me the pizzazz is not worth the cost in performance. I know there are other things i can do to get better performance out of this machine. As far as internal windows tweaks, i think ive just about covered them all. I just still feel like this thing isnt running at capacity. Oh well...another six months and ill have it figured out, and by that time itll be time to upgrade again, lol.
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J. A. Hayslett

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Chico

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RE:OT - Are any RAM boosting programs worth my time??
« Reply #8 on: August 15, 2002, 11:18:49 am »

Put your PC in the freezer and see what happens to the speed!
I've seen situations where experimentors have actually had LN2 hookups to their CPU's to enhance performance by as much as 80%!
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sekim

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RE:OT - Are any RAM boosting programs worth my time??
« Reply #9 on: August 15, 2002, 02:02:14 pm »

>>> Put your PC in the freezer and see what happens to the speed!
I've seen situations where experimentors have actually had LN2 hookups to their CPU's to enhance performance by as much as 80%! <<<


You wouldn't hear the fan so much either.
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Cameron

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RE:OT - Are any RAM boosting programs worth my time??
« Reply #10 on: August 15, 2002, 07:19:50 pm »

Yes, Rambooster works wonders.  I've used it on my Win98 machine, and it frees up memory that would otherwise be wasted--and not small quantities either.  It can often free up as much as 100 MB if there's a lot wasted (in Win98, this is just a fact of life).  I don't know how XP would be though, I'm guessing it's not so much different from 2k in that it's not nearly as necessary.  Still, try the program out (it's free)...just be aware that your milage may vary.
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Mirko

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RE:OT - Are any RAM boosting programs worth my time??
« Reply #11 on: August 15, 2002, 08:43:56 pm »

@Cameron:

It's very likely that the effect of "much more free memory" is only a faked one. I mean: The Rambooster tool may be just empty the harddisc cache (or force windows to like described above). This is quite common but not very usefull. Think about it: The cache is used for speeding up harddisc-access. And harddisc-access is a lot slower than memory-access. So _I_ would prefer speeding up harddisc than freeing up temporarly some memory (which is faster anyway than any harddisc).

I evualuted some memory booster programs myself a couple of month ago and noticed, that the "effects" are not measurable (using some testing suite like SiSoft Sandra and similar). But I noticed, that the access to programs slows down quite a lot (for a short period).

But... if the tools gives you the feeling of having an optimal tweak systems, it's ok. Maybe it even speeds up Win9x; I don't know that much about that architecture (and don't want to in fact *g*).

Mirko, just helpfull I hope.
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ciggieoxo

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RE:OT - Are any RAM boosting programs worth my time??
« Reply #12 on: August 15, 2002, 11:41:05 pm »

As Mirko wrote: "If you use Win98, Win95 or WinME... update. No memory "booster" could help avoiding those resorce limits, which are bigger problems with that systems than memory fragmentation."

There is so little benefit to using these memory recovery programs if you are running a lot of programs in various windows under Windows 95, 98, 98SE and Me. Memory can be "defragmented" by these memory recovery programs but what good is a few megs of recovered memory when the "resources" used by these flavors of Windows which choke are choking the system?

I have 512 RAM on my desktop which runs under Windows 98SE. That's more than enough for my use. I never run out of memory. However I do run into problems (crashes, freezes, blue screens and trhe like) because Win 98SE (also 95,ME) uses "resources" There are system resources, user resources, and GDI resources. Multi-tasking and opening a lot of windows chews up GDI resources. These resources give out long before memory does.

The solution is to switch to Win 2000 or Windows XP because Windows 2000 and XP do NOT use "resources." The problem with that is the lack of compatibility with some hardware/software: although most pieces of hardware have XP drivers now, switching from Windows 95, 98, 98SE, and ME to Win 2000 or XP is taking a chance that some important functions of your pc may not work.

There is absolutely no way to regain resources except by closing programs. Even then, some resources never get fully restored after closing programs or open windows. To free up resources completely Windows needs to be restarted; but, the process of using up resources just starts up again.

Of the several programs I tried which recover memory, it has been my expirience that the "RAM booster" programs actually hinder rather than help because they too take up resources for Windows 9x, & Me.

If people feel the need to tweek by using one of these so called RAM boosters, use Memory Zipper Plus because at least it has extra benefits like allowing the user to assign CPU priorities to running programs.
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DocLotus

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RE:OT - Are any RAM boosting programs worth my time??
« Reply #13 on: August 16, 2002, 08:47:47 am »

Hi Jared;

I’ve been heavily into PC’s since 81 & have never bought a ready to run PC; have always built my own from parts.

I have always been up to date in the area of what’s going on in the industry; used to subscribe to six publications in the PC market.

Sooo…. I can comment on so-called RAM boosters.

I did not know there were any so-called RAM boosters still around (see below).  I think you are referring to RAM optimizers (more on this later).

RAM Boosters…
If you are referring to software that is supposed to increase the total RAM from lets say 512 to 1024 Mb… forget them; THEY DON’T WORK, period!  Several years ago they were all the rage as RAM was expensive & everyone wanted to get something for nothing.  After all, Windows was a real resource hog (compared to DOS) & needed a lot of RAM to run reasonable well.  After the newness (and all the hype) of the so-call RAM boosters wore off, many reports begin to surface that none of them did any good & were a waste of money.  All the PC magazines started to write bad articles about them.  Many magazines refused to take any more advertisements for RAM boosters as they were bogus devices.  In fact, some of them were actually sued & had to return money to the buyers & went out of business.  I thought they were all gone as I have not seen any reference to them in several years.

RAM Optimizers…
A totally different story here.  This type of software does not increase the actual RAM, but defrags & returns wasted RAM to the memory pool as a single block of contiguous memory.

What are we talking about here?  As programs are loaded, they use memory.  When a well behaved program is unloaded it should return all the memory to the RAM pool.  But often, some of the memory is left behind as still being used, but in reality is just “wasted” memory. Even Microsoft programs do this.  Try this test; look at you available memory now.  Load Excel or Word; unload Excel & Word.  Look at the available memory, it will be slightly less then before you loaded Excel or Word.  Load & unload them again. Each time your available memory will go down slightly.  So the longer your computer is on, the greater the chance you available memory will decrease as you load & unload programs. This is why Windows machines need to be rebooted at least once a day (if you are a ‘power’ user).

A RAM optimizer returns the wasted memory to the RAM pool.  This can be most useful… if you have an older machine running Windows 3.0, 3.1, 3.11, 95, 98, 98SE, ME operating system & are constantly low on memory (more about this later).

Windows 3.0, 3.1, 3.11, 95, 98, 98SE, ME also have other problems with memory.  They were all very unstable & had to be restarted often (isn’t Windows wonderful?). The restarting process alone will reset the memory to a ‘clean’ memory startup.  However, sometimes (if you were very lucky) you could run for days between restarting Windows.  Then you had another problem; a lot of programs were opened & closed over the long term, many of which did not return all the memory back to the RAM pool.  This lead to memory being marked as in use that really wasn’t & also caused a lot memory fragmentation. The end result being that your real memory available to run programs slowly decreased as programs were closed until you did not have enough memory for all the windows resources.

Memory can become fragmented similar to hard drive fragmentation.  As programs close, they don’t always return the memory to the end of the contiguous block of memory.  The memory gets stuck in odd locations & therefore becomes fragmented.  The idea of defragging memory is that a single block of contiguous memory runs faster; but does it?

Yes they do work, that is, they do return ‘wasted” memory & defrag the RAM.  But do you receive any real benefit from that?  I have been using them for many years & find a mixed bag of results.

When I ran Win 98 with a 133Mhz processor & 64 Mb or RAM & tried to run Flight Simulator, my memory use was right on the edge... near 100% usage.  When it got to 100%, Flight Simulator slowed down to a crawl & became very ‘jerky’ with slow frame rates.  Using a program like WinRam Turbo helped somewhat as it freed up the ‘wasted’ memory by putting it back into the available memory pool.  So, on a slow machine with limited memory, yes it helped, but so did rebooting the computer.

I now have a 2.2 GHz machine with 512 Mb of DDR memory (running Win XP Pro) & find that memory optimizing & defragging does nothing for me.  I NEVER run out of memory no matter how many programs I have loaded.  As I write this, I have 55 processes open with 16 programs running, but my memory load is only 56%, CPU usage is only 3-6%, & Page File is only at 18%. So, on this machine, freeing up some ‘wasted’ memory does nothing for me.  Also, defragging the memory seems to provide no ‘boost’ to performance as the CPU simply uses some of the other available memory.  Yes, there may be some fragmented memory, but with so much available free memory for program use, who cares?

I still use WinRam Turbo Free just to get a quick look at the memory & CPU usage but find optimizing does nothing for performnce.

WinRam makes several optimizers & they are all wonderfully done.  You can down load them at
http://winramturbo.com/

Hope this helped shed some light on the question.
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Mirko

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RE:OT - Are any RAM boosting programs worth my time??
« Reply #14 on: August 16, 2002, 09:27:40 am »

@DocLocus:

Long explaining for things I already wrote... but very good.

One thing though: "Power users need to reboot serveral times a day". That's simply not true. I'm delevoping many software products and extensively using application like photoshop and office. I had _never_ needed to reboot because of memory shortage since Win95 (it was quite common there, I agree). Win2000 and WinXP are both very easy on "lost" memory, that _was_ a problem with the Win9x-versions.
Just to do some relativation ;-)

Thanks.

Mirko
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Charlemagne 8

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RE:OT - Are any RAM boosting programs worth my time??
« Reply #15 on: August 16, 2002, 04:49:10 pm »

I have used "RanBooster" for a couple of years and found it to work well. Without it, things tend to stop working more often. I have Win98SE. http://www.sci.fi/~borg/rambooster/index.htm
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Tuber

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RE:OT - Are any RAM boosting programs worth my time??
« Reply #16 on: August 17, 2002, 06:17:44 am »

I'm with C8. Rambooster on Win98 really does well.
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JaredH

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RE:OT - Are any RAM boosting programs worth my time??
« Reply #17 on: August 17, 2002, 07:31:43 am »

ive made it part of my daily ritual to reboot the computer, I personally think it makes a big difference and can tell when my computer hasnt been rebooted in a couple days.
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J. A. Hayslett

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robert

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RE:OT - Are any RAM boosting programs worth my time??
« Reply #18 on: August 19, 2002, 12:18:11 pm »

My girl friend has an old computer (WinME) and I will get her a new one in about 6 months.  I don't want to put more memory in her machine.  I read through this thread.  Anyone know for WinME which of the mentioned software works - ie:

Memory Zipper Plus
WinRam Turbo
RamBooster
others??

Thanks.
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