Happy Trails Computer Club

1. The "Free Memory" myth

1. More memory speeds up your computer [true]. But it's more physical memory that speeds up your computer -- not simply free memory. Adding physical memory is a good thing. Windows will use what it has to good advantage. Windows 95 does mismanage memory some of the time. Windows 98 manages it well in most circumstances though.
2. Windows could empty everything from memory that's not in immediate use (if it was designed that way.) But, most of that data will have to be saved to the disk (which takes time), and some of the data that was removed will be needed again soon. Windows will just have to go get it from the disk again. That's at least a thousand times slower than accessing it in memory. Might as well have left it in there in the first place.

Many programs are available that promise to "free up" memory. But these programs waste time to empty memory (some of the contents of memory can't just be dumped, they have to be written to disk). Worse than that, these programs have no idea if something they remove will have to be reloaded in memory because it's needed again. In contrast, if Windows guesses right on what to leave, it's way ahead of the game. In summary, Windows is designed to think ahead and uses memory for things that it anticipates. It usually turns out to be false economy to try to keep memory "free".

What Windows does do is run out of "system resources". Resources are a special area in memory. Unfortunately, Microsoft decided to limit resources to a miserly 64 KBytes. It was OK in the early days of Windows 95, but it's a severe bottleneck in Windows 98. (The problem has been eliminated in Windows XP.) Running out of resources can't be fixed with more memory. No matter how much you install, resources are always just 64 KBytes. And when the computer runs out of resources, it doesn't just slow down, it crashes.

There is one memory manager that has some value. I've used it and many others swear by it. RAMpage is good when you've been using a program that uses lots of memory, and then want to switch to another program that also needs a lot of memory. RAMpage also can be set to defrag memory, which helps to keep performance high. Memory gets fragmented too -- much like your hard drive does. It's always unfragmented each time you start your computer, but RAMpage can defrag memory while Windows is running. [RAMpage]

2. The "Swap File" myth

3. The Free Space myth

	When your hard drive fills up, your computer slows down [false]. Oh, it does slow down slightly, but if you keep it defragmented properly, it slows down very little. Click Settings > select the settings shown here > click OK > select the drive to defragment > click OK. Files that are used the most will be located on the fastest part of the drive and the rest will be out of the way..
Fig 1 - Disk Defragmenter Settings

Resources

System settings.