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General discussion

Question to R. Proffit.

Sep 19, 2007 3:55AM PDT

Bob,

I was reading in this forum and in some thread you wrote:

"""-> Again, free ram is wasted ram in VM OSes. Imagine if people ever found out what a sham free ram programs were. How would those that made such earn a living?"""

Can you explain that to a newbie like me?

Are you saying that those programs that free some of your ram when it reaches an specified level are useless?

I will appreciate an explanation.

Thanks in advance.

Discussion is locked

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Start with this article.
Sep 19, 2007 4:29AM PDT

Sadly I can't teach operating systems in this small space but only can hope that someone doesn't pay for such things.

-> http://www.aumha.org/win5/a/xpvm.php

You'll also see comments about "defragmenting RAM" (or memory.) Again another ploy to part people from their money.

Bob

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understood
Sep 22, 2007 8:24AM PDT

Ok bob, thanks, understood. Free RAM is wasted RAM and those "ram-free" programs are useless.

There is nothing to worry about if most of your ram is busy because windows will manage it anyway.

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Now let's move to the next step.
Sep 22, 2007 11:58PM PDT

We don't want to be blind about memory usage by softwares in our system. If you find a program growing in size to gigabytes then something could be terribly wrong with that program. However I have a video editing program that while rendering a DVD will grow to 2 or 3 GB (depends on the machine and the /3GB boot.ini setting) during it's work. That one is fine but there have been pests (malware) and legitimate software with programming bugs that you find and need to address.

There is also many discussions about trimming services you don't use in the OS to free up memory, speed up boot time and make the coffee taste better.

Hope this completes the picture for you.

Bob