Spacey, you trying to break hearts, stripping away our nice rose-colored
sunglasses? It could be these utilities fill a helpful psychological
purpose. Rather like industry practice in women's clothing stores to put
cleverly selected mirrors in the dressing rooms - the ones that make the
customer look thinner.
These programs do not overcome the resource limitations of 9x and ME,
but they do serve to lubricate the memory hierarchy in a way far
superior to the method Windows uses. Swapping is more intelligent also
it would seem that the method Windows uses. There are several extra
caches (buffers) created that increase performance. There is a buffer
on your hard disk and another created by Ram Idle.
Or, in short, I disagree with the many who have bashed these
utilities. I bought a commercial product and it did suck eggs. This is
not true for Ram Idle.
Many people today have a good amount of RAM. And, as you point out, the
actual value of the "RAM freeing" type of program has been brought into
serious doubt, extensively, by those who spend a lot of time studying such
things.
All that I have read about the issue is barking up the wrong trees
about the matter. They talk of the miniscule time saved in defragging
ram due to direct access, rather than the huge savings enjoyed in
opening an application that requires contiguous memory cells and
having those contiguous cells already available. This is pretty
ridiculous IMO. There are many functions and data types that require
contiguous memory cells.
Rather than flowing right into memory:
1) Windows must poll all memory cells to determine if the correct
number of contiguous memory cells are available. This is highly
unlikely in memory that has not been defragged. Still, it must be
done.
2) Windows must determine what needs to be swapped out and swap it
out... while you wait.
3) Windows must defrag to a degree in most situations to achieve the
contiguous memory cells. This is due to loading apps that do not
require contiguous memory cells in a "fragged" fashion. Bits and
pieces are stored anywhere in memory, leaving it highly fragmented.
4) The loader moves the application into memory and returns a pointer
to the first memory cell.
Or, all of this could have quietly been done in the background before
you even thought of opening the application.
The resources issue, for users of a W9x OS, agree, that's the central
matter. I depend continuously on Quick Resource. It tells me how much
I can run and have open at a time. And its alarm saves me from all those
crashes caused by low resource. Re TClockEx, it uses the resource monitor
applet that comes with windows, providing a display that many prefer. No
alarm, but it's an important minimum, when running w9x, to at least have
your resources level easily visible.
Or, just run RamIdle and not worry about it? I often have more stuff
open than I can keep up with and just don't have a problem. I can most
definitely tell RamIdle is running. Perhaps I don't run apps that
demand as much resource allocation as others, I dunno. I run quite a
bit of different programs though.
I'm using 98SE, 256 megs of ram and 128k cache. I have a target of 64
megs of free ram set and a minimum of 16 megs. It took alot of
tweaking to come up with the best settings for my system. I can spare
the 64 megs, which is defragged in the background, and which will
accept any program that I run... no questions asked.
If you guys have the time, I challenge you to try out RamIdle for a
month or so. Tweak it to your system, get used to it, and then remove
it and see if you still think that it is an unnecessary application as
to system performance. It is important that it be tweaked to optimal
performance for your system and that you become accustomed to the
increased performance before removing it. Remove or disable any
polling programs like QA. This is a waste of clock cycles with Ram
Idle.
One _major_ setting is to disable (check the box) the CPU usage graph
on the main screen of Ram Idle. You can't see the graph and it
decreases the free clock cycles of the CPU dramatically, as does any
constantly polling application. This is the most important setting.
If you're up to it, get rid of the polling apps and give this a try:
http://www.woundedmoon.org/win32/ramidlnt.html 633,268 bytes
Other settings that I recommend for systems with 100 megs of ram or
more:
Set your system up as a network server both in Start/Control
Panel/System/Performance and in Ram Idle Cache.
Set the system profile in Ram Idle as Multimedia or Game System. I
don't do either, but this leaves an aggressively set chore for RI.
Tweak the various cache settings until you can tell the difference,
and of course elect the superior settings. I seriously think the
reason so many people blow off this program is that they did not
invest the time to tweak the various settings to achieve the superior
performance. Start with the recommended settings and play with them
over a period of time.
Under Tweaks, check the boxes for: (important)
Contiguous file allocation size.
Add buffer for hard disk (that makes two buffers!).
The third box I did not select:
Make Windows use memory as much as possible.
Mine works great without this box checked. You might play with it and
see if you can detect any changes when this option is set.
It is worth your time IMO. The choice is yours.
