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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Topic: OT - Are any RAM boosting programs worth my time?? (Read 2333 times)