News :: 15MR: TweakRAM

Hello all and welcome to a Valentine’s Day special! Actually, Giveaway of the Day didn’t do anything specific for the holiday, so oh well. Happy Valentine’s day to all of you.

Today’s application is TweakRAM—A system memory-optimization application. As Giveaway of the Day states:

“TweakRAM is a handy memory optimizer tool that will keep your computer running faster and efficiently. It increases your system performance by making more memory available for your applications and the operating system.

TweakRAM defragments your computer’s memory, increasing the efficiency of your CPU and Motherboard caches, recovers memory leaks from poorly behaved applications, flushes unused libraries temporarily out to disk and so on. By all this optimization tricks your favorite applications and games will run faster and efficiently even on old computers.

Using this RAM optimizer utility your computer will achieve superior performance. There is no need to buy additional expensive memory for your computer. TweakRAM will defragment system memory for faster access time. TweakRAM doesn’t modify your system in any way and your system will be even more stable with TweakRAM installed.

No matter how much physical memory you have, TweakRAM will help keep your computer running faster and efficiently.”

Quick Pros

• Pushes unused components to swapfile
• Simple interface
• Easy to set up for automatic usage
• Does clear up unused DLLs and such

Quick Cons

• Unsure that all ‘claimed’ features exist
• Doesn’t seem to work great or at all on high-memory systems

Expansion

I went into this application rather excited. Back in the days of Windows 95 and the memory compression tools, memory defragmentation tools, and so much more. The day when we used to have to squeeze every little bit of memory unless you had large dollars to throw at your system. It’s still somewhat true this day. With memory bloat drifting upwards in conjunction with programming bloat, it is still a bit of a rat race. Any of you who may be stuck at a job which you have to have Photoshop, Illustrator, Outlook and other applications open and running while you’re on 1 GB of memory feel the hurt often. I was excited to see this application, but truly wondered about its claimed features. If they were true, why wasn’t an app that could fully defragment the memory and do all this earlier? I remember the reason for it previously; Windows 2000 and Windows XP had a layer between the memory and the applications to prevent what some of these earlier applications used to do in Windows 95; Bring your system to its knees, corrupt files and so forth due to poor coding.

I started the interface and was surprised at the richness of the information; quite useful. The tool tray icon is nice too, as is all the tools in the tool menu (Though why they defaulted on the Eject CD on Shutdown to on, is beyond me, good thing I caught that.) I loaded up a bunch of apps this morning and ran for about 15 minutes, leaving some idle in the background, untouched. Others I used like I do every morning to check my email and such. Now, I must confess, I’m happily sitting on 2GB RAM, so I did truly wonder what it would do; however, the application does state it pushes the data to the side which isn’t in use; I’ve had apps running for a while; it should do it anyways, and I should see the defragmentation occur anyways; I am using over 500MB of my ram. I have ‘AutoFree’ on and try it. Free before: 1496MB. Free after: 1496.

Hrm. So maybe I don’t have enough loaded. I started up Photoshop, loaded a HUGE file. Try AutoFree again. Same result. Okay, so maybe it’s not useful on 2GB of memory. I was figuring that this would happen on my system. I unloaded Photoshop and thought I’d go for the large ‘Try to free’. I turned it up to 2GB, just to see what it would do. It chugs away again, and bam. This:

I figured that this would happen. Nothing budges. Very odd. I’ll try on my work computer in a while and will reply on the findings later. It only has 1GB, and its been on for days. I’m HOPING it’ll work there; It NEEDS it some days.

Now one thing peculiar I did notice; Both settings went by very fast for being a defragmentation of the memory. 2GB should still take a few seconds to defragment, even when I had 500MB in memory. AutoFree took under a half of a second, and Try to Free 3 seconds. Scroll down this page for a definition of defragment—It means to make one contiguous segment. Now honestly, the problem with defragmenting memory is this: Does it work? Because of the nature of memory, having the memory contiguous memory would be such a small speed boost because there is basically no random access times, it probably would not result in any speed increases at all. To top it off, I don’t see signs of it being done which should take a little bit of time, especially since I have over 10 applications up right now.

I stopped here. I could have dug out some of my old games which leak memory like sieves. I could have written a quick app that leaks memory, but as it is, I’m already outside my 15 minute window for this review as it is.

Verdict (But not final)

Well, I’m not going to render final verdict YET. I will say that I do wonder that if the ‘stated’ features do truly exist; Most notably the memory leak clearing feature and the defragmentation layer. Both of these would require kernel-level memory access which while can be done, I can’t see it happening here. While I don’t see proof that it works, in concept its pretty handy. Its tools are a plus as is their meters. Would I recommend downloading it? If you’re on a low-memory system and end up messing with your swap file often, I would say try it. If it even manages to work better than Windows swap system, it’s got to be worth something. For myself at home, it is apparently of no use. For $19.95, I don’t know if I could recommend it at this point. There are freeware versions out there. FreeRAM XP Pro (Thanks The Advanced Specialist)

As well, I just read the comments on the forums. Check this link out. Helps understand the situation more: Memory Booster Discussion (Thanks Borgtex)

I will post final verdict once I get to work.

Extension (Work and more)

Well, just to keep this short, I tried it at work. It didn’t do anything on ‘AutoFree’, and setting it to 25% of the memory (250MB of 1GB) hung my system, requiring a full reboot. I asked a relative who runs a computer lab; Relative loaded every program he could to push it right to the edge of memory limits (512MB). Out of 3 computers, same general results; “AutoFree” did nothing; Anything above 10MB either sludged the system down BAD or hung it altogether for 15-20minutes, requiring a full reboot.

Final Verdict

Okay, my final verdict is that I would recommend staying away from this application. Some people are having okay results, some aren’t seeing a thing, and others are having soft and hard crashes. With a run like this, I’d probably steer clear until stability can be looked at. If you really need to try something like this, do it while its free; Backup first and try it. You may have luck. You may not. If it works for you, excellent. I would not recommend paying for this however, not with the chance of instability.

Posted by BladedThoth on Wednesday, February 14, 2007