SE..been surfing around looking for some windowz trick stuff and found this:
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The 10-7-99 Win9x ©Trick in TIPS95.TXT, part of W95-11D.ZIP:
FREE MORE MEMORY
You can get back some of the memory available to Windows 9x, which after working/playing for a while, decreases, even if you have closed all open apps/games, and is not the same as right after bootup, before you started your first program/game.
This is due in part to poor programming skills, because a lot of software does not release ALL the memory it has used back to the system, and in part to the Win9x GUI inability of managing memory very well. :(
You can test this "annoyance" by running SysMon, a cool tool included with Win9x, located in your Windows folder. Start System Monitor right after you loaded Windows, and before opening any program. Configure it this way: click Edit -> select Add Item... -> click Memory Manager -> select "Unused physical memory" -> hit OK. Now remember the number it shows before you start your first program/game, and then after a while, take a peek at SysMon's chart again, and compare the current value with the initial one. The latter will be undoubtedly smaller than the former.
But there is something you can do, you can free some of this memory and return it to the system, two ways:
Run a dedicated tool like RAMBooster (freeware), which monitors, defragments and reclaims a selected unused RAM amount, returning it to Windows at preset intervals, or upon demand.
The other (easier and doesn't eat up ANY CPU cycles or "precious" GDI resources) option is to create a small text file (in Notepad) with this single line:
FreeMem = Space(24000000)
Save it as FREEMEM.VBS (Visual Basic Script file) and place it on the Desktop. The filename is of no importance, but the extension must be kept.
But first you need to make sure your Windows 9x system has the newest version (5.5) of Microsoft Scripting Engines (MSE) properly installed. MSE 5.5 includes: VBScript 5.5, JScript 5.5, Windows Script Components, Windows Script Host (WSH) 2.0 and Windows Script Runtime 5.1.
If using Windows 98, 98 SE(U) or MS IE 5.0x, you already have all these system components installed, but an older version (5.1).
If using Windows 95, OSR1 or OSR2 without MS IE 5.0x, you need to download and install MSE.
For more WSH info read this MSKB article.
Now whenever you want to regain a little more RAM, especially after long periods of time, when system memory depletion might start impairing overall Win9x performance, just (double)-click on FREEMEM.VBS, and your system's available RAM will increase with the amount specified in parenthesis (see above), in this case 24 Mb. You can adjust this number to match your needs (even create more VBS files to free different memory amounts), but try not to go over 1/2 your installed RAM.
If you do exceed the maximum of (re)usable RAM, you'll get a "Windows Scripting Host - Script Execution Error" message box, like:
"Category: Microsoft VBScript runtime error
Description: Out of string space: 'Space'"
Make sure to close ALL programs you're done with BEFORE running FREEMEM.VBS.
To execute the VBS file unattended, you could use System Agent (Task Scheduler) to run it at will (i.e. once an hour), but that would consume extra CPU cycles and Windows GDI resources. :(
Have fun.
UPDATE: "I've written a C program that uses minimal memory, CPU and system/user/GDI resources to achieve the same results. Check it out [freeware]!
One of RAMPage's big advantages (apart from the fact that it makes RAMBooster look enormous), is that it will still work (provided it was already started), when there is absolutely no memory available. The VB script will fail to start.
The display (Tray icon) is also quite useful when performing general system tweaks. I've been getting very good reports from users who have tried it."
This update courtesy of John Fitzgibbon (fitz@jfitz.com) author of RAMPage. |
