Filed under: Utilities, Windows, Freeware
Instant Memory Cleaner frees up your precious RAM
by Simon Kerbel Feb 7th 2008 at 2:00PM
If you covet your RAM like Gollum coveted the ring, then Instant Memory Cleaner should be one of the tools in your toolbox. Designed for XP and Vista, Instant Memory Cleaner frees up your memory by forcing pages out of physical memory and reducing the size of running processes' working sets to a minimum.
The program sits in your Windows Taskbar; when clicked, it pops up a small and simple interface. There's a button to show you real time memory usage (with stats for physical memory, pagefile, and virtual memory), another to click for help, and one that will initialize the memory freeing process.
Short, sweet, and now you know it complete.
Instant Memory Cleaner is a free download for XP and Vista.
I don't know if this is a labor of love or merely the brainchild of four very gifted games designers, but Level Up is a really weird mash-up of gaming elements that you have probably never seen in a Flash game before.
Let's start with the premise itself: Groundhog Day meets Memento. The game experience revolves around 'days': you explore the world and the clock slowly ticks towards the evening. You bounce around picking up gems and talking to the denizens of 'Level Upland'. Eventually you feel tired and head back to ...
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
Steve said 2:21PM on 2-07-2008
OMG, why is this site promoting garbage like this? The only thing these memory cleaners do is slow down your system, especially in Vista. That stuff in memory, it's cached so that your system will be far more responsive. What is the point of having your memory sitting there empty doing nothing? If a program needs more memory Windows WILL release memory for it.
I thought programs like this were debunked as being useless and even detrimental years ago, it saddens me to see them still being hoisted on unknowledgable users. :(
Reply
Crome Tysnomi said 2:49PM on 2-07-2008
What Steve said. This memory freeing bollucks does nothing but increase HDD activity with swapping (forcing pages out? what the hell?!) therefore making idle programs even a bigger pain to bring back to focus and whatnot.
Physical memory is there for a reason: To be used up by all the processes to store everything for quick access. Paging out to VM is equivalent to replacing petrol with water in a car fuel system.
Reply
carl said 3:01PM on 2-07-2008
Ewww, no thanks. I got 4GB of ram for 75$ (before rebate), and I intend to use it.
Reply
LySiNe said 3:27PM on 2-07-2008
I turn on Disable Paging Executive just to make the machine faster. And now they want to page it out. Boo...
Reply
Mikado said 4:55PM on 2-07-2008
Not this "free your precious RAM" garbage again. As much as we rail against Microsoft, they do have some very smart people working on the operating system kernel, and one of the things they have gotten very good at is RAM management. Blindly dumping pages from RAM does absolutely no good whatsoever, and interferes with a system process that already knows what it's doing.
Retract this review, please.
Reply
Simon Kerbel said 4:38PM on 2-07-2008
Hello everybody:
Thanks for all of your comments. Here's what we know: the program is actually just a front end for Microsoft's command line "ClearMem" for Windows XP and "FreeMem" for Windows Vista. Is this program useful for clearing out memory that might be "held on to" by old applications and processes? Maybe someone smarter than us can tell us that.
It's not our policy to retract reviews unless the facts of the review are incorrect. A program like this does exist; it states what its purpose is; it's up to the users to download it and see if it does what it says. In our experience, we downloaded and installed it, and it did what it said.
Thanks for listening!
Simon
DS
Reply
hazard said 11:18PM on 2-07-2008
Simon, I wouldn't worry too much about comments from people who [seemingly] don't know or care about anything beyond their backyard ;)
Simon Kerbel said 4:38PM on 2-07-2008
Hello everybody:
Thanks for all of your comments. Here's what we know: the program is actually just a front end for Microsoft's command line "ClearMem" for Windows XP and "FreeMem" for Windows Vista. Is this program useful for clearing out memory that might be "held on to" by old applications and processes? Maybe someone smarter than us can tell us that.
It's not our policy to retract reviews unless the facts of the review are incorrect. A program like this does exist; it states what its purpose is; it's up to the users to download it and see if it does what it says. In our experience, we downloaded and installed it, and it did what it said.
Thanks for listening!
Simon
DS
Reply
NyaR said 2:54AM on 2-08-2008
You guys are supposed to be, at least, relatively informed. Why would you post this??? Are they paying you?
Reply
Scott said 6:25PM on 2-07-2008
Hmmm... I beg to differ. For years, I've used AMS Fast Defrag (www.amsn.ro/index.php?action=2), and the memory-clearing function is fast & quite useful (when you adjust the settings properly).
Is it "...useful for clearing out memory that might be 'held on to' by old applications and processes?" I can't speak for the program profiled here, but I know AMS Fast Defrag absolutely is--particularly on older PCs, or PCs without much RAM (like the sad PCs I support at my job).
Reply
Stuart said 12:26AM on 2-08-2008
Programs like this are a joke. Things that claim to defrag your memory are a joke. Yes, you can defrag _files_, like your swap file, and that will help performance some, but you can not defrag memory.
Forcing all of your memory to page out is just going to slow down your system. Don't use this.
Reply
Dodfr said 3:17AM on 2-08-2008
Hello,
As developper I have to say that such tool is totally useless, Windows already knows when it must swap mem to disk and switch it back, forcing it mean more time to get memory back for all programs as soon as you switch back to them.
And the funniest thing is : just look at the amount of memory such tool use for itself ;-)
Reply
Jreg said 5:50AM on 2-08-2008
AnalogX MaxMem, far better.
Because some people dont have slots for 4GB of ram. Go away.
Reply