Kerkia

Background

Memory optimization programs allow reducing the amount of physical RAM used by processes. This can be particularly useful when you run programs that are not properly optimized in terms of memory usage, or that simply have memory leaks. And this is of course most useful if your computer has insufficient memory for all the applications you want to run in parallel.

Recommendation

We have not found any product that we found really good and free, so have decided to implement our own. Because most tools out there just minimize the usage of the physical RAM all the time while we think this is wrong as we are believers that RAM must be used for the computer to work fast, albeit not in full so the computer does not become too slow, and because we don’t believe we can do better than Windows at optimizing the overall system while however believing that users know what programs could use less memory and what should not, we have designed Minimem such that it allows users to decide when to optimize and what to optimize. In addition, we’ve designed the algorithm so that it remains fully non-intrusive and optimal, just running in the background and sitting in the system tray.

Another alternative is CleanMem. This utility has no user interface and instead is to be run from the Windows scheduler. The advantage of this approach is that it uses no memory in-between optimizations, the disadvantage being that all processes are optimized at once and no advanced scheduling can be implemented, like in Minimem. Another difference is that CleanMem will by default minimizes all processes that make sense and allow users to exclude some processes; so this works the other way around compared to Minimem since the latter requires users to specify all processes to be optimized.

Web links

Minimem

Web site: http://www.kerkia.com/

Download: http://main.kerkia.com/Tools/Minimem/Download.aspx

Cleanmem

Web site: http://www.pcwintech.com/node/145

Download: http://www.majorgeeks.com/CleanMem_d5993.html