When you're hard-pressed for RAM, you've got to choose your applications wisely.
(Credit: Acer)At the end of December, my colleague Seth Rosenblatt put together a thoughtful and in-depth Windows Starter Kit that collects the best-of-breed freeware applications for all categories. But what if your new Windows computer can be balanced on the palm of your hand and contains only a whiff of RAM?
Take, for instance, the tiny Acer AspireOne laptop that my mother purchased on little more than a whim and a phenomenal deal. Not for kitchen lookups of recipes or way to win dinnertime debates, as I had imagined when we first slipped the preemie out of its box, but as a way to look up Wikipedia articles, send late night e-mails, and perhaps play a Hulu or YouTube video before nodding off.
With a piddly 512MB of RAM, my mother's new little gem can ill afford to suffer extras, especially when meeting specific, domestic demands. No, it's time to get ruthless.
Despite its diminutive capacity, Little Gem came with plenty crapware on it, and more auto-installed after registration. I fired up the thorough Revo Uninstaller (to uninstall after all is said and done) and fed it an appetizer of Google Desktop and Google Toolbar. (There will be few files to find.) Adobe Reader likewise went out, the free, lighter FoxIt Reader taking its place.
Internet Explorer gets to stay for the time being, only to facilitate Microsoft's automatic updates. While the lighter Chrome would be the natural browser choice, Firefox won over for the time being, so that the folks can use the Foxmarks Bookmark Synchronizer extension to share bookmarks with the main computer. McAfee's Site Advisor security add-on for Firefox (and IE) is another perk, and one that also offers peace of mind.
Googlepedia is another useful, time-saving add-on that will bring my mom's Wikipedia articles to her if she begins a search within Google. I might also consider installing CustomizeGoogle to blast away ads.
My mother is thus far unshakeable in her use of Outlook for e-mail, but if she can content herself to simply send messages by starlight and forgo reorganizing her in-box, we can rip out the entire Microsoft Office suite. Web applications such as Google Docs will work fine should the occasion arise, and if spreadsheet making and memoir writing go full-scale, Go-OO would likely serve her purpose.
Keeping my mom's new Internet nugget light and lean takes top priority, but the applications she needs for a streamlined experience won't fit everyone's profile. Which small, resource-saving applications do you use to keep from gobbling up all your RAM?
If you need to free up system memory or if you think you do but aren't sure, this little tool will provide the help you need.
Instant Memory Cleaner provides an easy-to-use front-end interface for Microsoft's command-line ClearMem and FreeMem commands (for XP and Vista, respectively). It installs an icon to your system tray, and its color provides a handy clue about your system's memory use. When the icon is green, the system's free memory is more than 30 percent of the total physical memory; yellow means less is available; and red means its time for action.
The informative small pane that opens when clicking the tray icon is useful, displaying the megabytes of free physical memory and a check box that verified whether the application launches at boot. Also included are buttons for launching a memory-cleaning session, opening Help, minimizing the pane, or exiting the utility. A final button opens a fresh pane (again, nicely designed) with details on current memory use, including megabytes of Total Physical Memory, megabytes of Memory in Use, and percentage of Memory in Use.
This powerful application offers extensive utilities to improve your system's performance and protect your privacy. Glary Utilities' well-organized interface allows users to easily choose from several tools. It cleans unwanted junk files and removes invalid and broken shortcuts, freeing up valuable disk space.
There's a registry cleaner that allows you to scan, remove, and back up faulty entries. You also can wipe out Internet Explorer traces and tweak start-up programs and memory optimization. Privacy-conscious users will certainly appreciate the inclusion of a government-standard file shredder to securely delete data. Users who are looking for an effective and easy-to-use application to keep their system in tip-top shape should try this one out.
Even in these days of cheap RAM, where you can get an extra gigabyte of the stuff for around $40 or so, there's not much you can do about must-have programs that leak memory short of seeking out an alternative. That doesn't mean you're tied to incessant program restarts and operating system reboots, though: a few useful programs such as RAM Idle LE, RAMBooster, and Instant Memory Cleaner make it their business to reclaim wasted bits.
Instant Memory Cleaner sports a main interface several times smaller than its options window.
(Credit: CNET Networks)RAMBooster is well-known to longtime Daily Download readers. We've featured it in our Windows Starter Kit and in a First Look video. For a freeware program not updated since 2005, it functions amazingly well. Using program defaults or modifying the setting through the Preferences screen of the Edit menu, determine how much RAM you'd like it to free up and at which point of resource consumption. RAMBooster will keep track of RAM usage and scrub your RAM free of flotsam left behind by closed windows and background programs.
As free memory falls, the system tray icon will change color from red and black to yellow. Mousing over will reveal your current available RAM, and right-clicking will access the user-initiated cleaning menu.
This is all well and good, but I've noticed that when running multiple programs that leak memory or otherwise consume a lot, RAMBooster seems to hamper performance more than enhance it. Everything from typing to Web site downloading will be sluggish, and when I kill RAMBooster it goes away. It's an imperfect standard, to be sure, but sometimes you've got to go with what works, and what doesn't.
RAM Idle LE sports a more contemporary interface, and doesn't seem to suffer from the same endurance problem that plagues RAMBooster. The left nav offers the RAM Optimizer and a System Information tab. The information is culled from your computer's version of Windows, the amount of RAM you have, paging memory, version of Internet Explorer installed, and more. Most of it is nice to know but not really essential for a RAM rescuing program.
RAM Idle doesn't look unique, but it does a great job of cleaning your RAM while in use.
(Credit: CNET Networks)Just as in RAMBooster, RAM Idle lets users set the amount of RAM they need to have available, and it also has automatic settings to keep things running smoothly without constant attention. It's nearly double the size of RAMBooster, at just under 900 KB, but it offers many more settings for you to play with.
The main RAM Optimizer pane is kind of useless, with an unlabeled graph that I think is supposed to represent CPU usage taking up most of the space. From below it, though, or from the context menu for the system tray icon, users can enable or disable the program, manually set the free RAM target and minimum free RAM, as well as enable further RAM-optimizing functions.
Users can set a certain amount of RAM to be freed within 60 seconds after start-up, and they can also set a smaller amount of RAM to be freed regularly thereafter if the amount of free RAM falls below a certain percentage. So, for example, 64 MB can be freed every 4 minutes if there's more than 25 percent of your system's RAM in use. Enacting any of the changes made requires hitting the Save button that lives over the left nav. Clearly, the layout could use an overhaul.
Still a fan-fave, RAMBooster hasn't been updated in three years.
(Credit: CNET Networks)The RAM Idle system tray icon shows the amount of free RAM as part of its icon, but it drops a digit in numbers larger than 999. The program also has context menu tools for restarting, shutting down, and hibernating Windows, and predetermined amounts of RAM that you can force it to free. Overall, it benefits from the added features, compared with RAMBooster's minimalist approach.
Instant Memory Cleaner is another tiny program for freeing bogged-down RAM. The freeware sports an equally tiny interface, a small box that loads in the bottom right of your screen. The boxy user interface shows available RAM in real time, and if you want more information you can click the pen icon to get a detailed breakdown of what's eating up your memory. A Windows-logo knockoff icon instigates the memory clean, and other buttons lets users minimize or exit the program, and access the help menu. A bar in the center of the program provides mouse-over information.
Some users may be bothered by Instant Memory Cleaner's atypical and hard-to-see interface, but since these programs should be used for their effect and not their aesthetic standards, simple is better here. Although it lacks the useful advanced settings of RAM Idle, it does what it's supposed to at least as well enough as RAMBooster, and without all the extra hang-ups.
RAM Idle does the job for me--I especially like how I can set a specific level of RAM to keep open. If you have a favorite RAM cleaner that you use, tell us about it in the comments below.
If you spend a bit of time searching the Download.com Mac catalog, you might notice a lot of applications that seem identical. These are separate installers for the same programs, but one is for a Mac with an Intel processor, and the other is for a PowerPC chip. Not every program has separate installers, though, and once you've got your program up and running that can lead to a lot of wasted space.
Xslimmer trims your installers to fighting form.
(Credit: CNET Networks)Xslimmer is an effective shareware tool that costs a lot less than buying an brand-new hard drive, even at the plummeting cost of memory. For just over the price of an Alexander Hamilton, Xslimmer will sweep your Applications folder and remove all the excess code from your program installers that you don't need. For example, if you've got an Intel processor, Xslimmer will cut down iTunes from 129MB to 31.6MB: that's gastric bypass surgery but for your computer.
You can drag and drop specific programs into the main Xslimmer window, or you can hit the Genie button and it'll add every program it can find on your machine. Once you're ready to go, hit the Slim! button in the lower-right corner and Xslimmer rips out unnecessary weight from your apps. Other buttons on the nav include Stop to halt the process, Clear to remove all unselected files, and Reveal to show the selected program in Finder. History reveals your behavior log.
There are some programs that are internally blocked by Xslimmer itself from the process--Safari is one that's blacklisted--but the app will make backups for you just in case you mess something up. The trial version limits users to liposuctioning 50MB. If you want to remove anything more, you'll have to pay.
When Power Downloader is hard at work in the Powerlair he often has several programs running simultaneously. Though he has plenty of RAM in his super system, Power likes to keep track of memory usage to see what's taking up the most space. It also helps to have memory tracking apps when he needs to diagnose system slow downs.
Use the preferences to choose which trackers you would like displayed
(Credit: CNET Networks)To keep track of how much memory is being used by his mission-critical apps, Power Downloader uses FreeMeter. With this free program on his computer, Power can track disk space usage, memory usage, disk transfer rates, and more all from a constantly updating interface. He can customize FreeMeter to show him only the usage statistics he wants to see and can designate which drives to track. To see how his computer is performing at a glance, Power also can display icons in his system tray showing memory and CPU usage. In the event of a system slow down, Power can check FreeMeter to see if an unexpected amount of memory is being used making it possible for him to zero in on potential problems and hidden resource hogs.
In Power Downloader's line of work tracking down Internet criminals, his computer must always be running at peak performance. With FreeMeter on his hard drive, Power can easily track several components of his computer's performance for free.
(Credit:
CNET Networks)
Power Downloader uses several types of software throughout his day including word processors, mapping programs, database apps, and even a few games during break time to let off some steam. In his endless hunt for top-notch applications, Power also ends up using a few programs that aren't all they were cracked up to be. With all the software Power sifts through, it should come as no surprise that some apps even have memory leaks that end up slowing down his system to a crawl. As a software superhero, a slow system simply will not suffice.... Read more
What ails your sluggish computer? Old hardware? A fragmented hard drive? Or maybe it's overloaded RAM.
RAMBooster is a CNET Download.com user favorite for expanding the boundaries of your computer's available RAM. It's no substitute for the real thing, but combined with a few other choice utilities, RAMBooster is one ingredient in a faster, slicker Windows XP.
See how RAMBooster works in the video below, and as always, tune into other great First Look videos from the CNET Download.com crew.
- prev
- 1
- next
