How do you free up memory on Windows XP?

Answer 1

1. Right click on an empty spot on your desktop and select New - Shortcut. 2. Type %windir%\system32\rundll32.exe advapi32.dll,ProcessIdleTasks in the box. 3. Click Next. 4. Give your shortcut a nice name like "Clean Memory" 5. Click Finish and you're done. Now whenever your computer starts running slow click this shortcut to flush everything out of memory

Answer 2

go to windows explorer. left click on c:\. once your mouse is on c:\, right click, choose "properties". You can do a "disk cleanup". After disk cleanup, at the top of the properties window, click on "tools". Choose "defragment". These two things will get some space back and should help performance.

Answer 3

This works well for me. I found the idea online, but had to tweak the command a bit to make it work.

• Right click on an empty area on your desktop
• select "NEW"
• The select "SHORTCUT"
• When the dialogue box pops up type:
• C:\WINDOWS\system32\rundll32.exe advapi32.dll,ProcessIdleTasks
• Then click "Next"
• Name it "Clear RAM" or whatever you want
• Then click finish

When you want to clear the ram, just double click on your "Clear RAM" icon.

I hope it helps.

Phat

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Edit by halladayrules:

What Morgrum has posted below is true. Also the above command posted will rebuild the layout.ini file as well located in C:\Windows\Prefetch will can cause always cached programs to become uncache thus impeding performance thus the operating system has to rebuild the file again.

Response to Grover 2000:

The "freemem" command you mentioned works to an extent, but for a lot of anti virus programs it picks up the script as a virus and you have to whitelist it first. Also be sure not to free up a block of memory too big because if you dump the virtual memory (page file) then cached programs become uncached and thus they are slow to load again. I found that out. I used the freemem command to clear out my page file, the page file went from 1400MB to 512MB which brought my RAM from 1.4GB to 512MB but the system began running real slow afterword. Windows Media Player was slow to open, browser was slow. I also find that its a waste of time to completely empty your RAM as overtime the RAM will be cached anyway. I once had my machine down to 384MB of RAM on Windows Server 2008 R2 but when i went to bed and woke up in the morning it was right back up to around 850MB like the day I installed it. I usually find the best method is to use around 80% of the RAM (have it spike to about 3.50GB used) and then dump the RAM. I also have a little trick that I use, I have a script that will open my browser, windows media player, and other programs I frequently use so that they stay in memory and they can be loaded quickly after running the script.

Edit by Morgrum:

The above answer is a repeat of a common Windows myth. See http://home.comcast.net/~SupportCD/XPMyths.html

ProcessIdleTasks simply does not do what all these people think that it does. If I understand correctly, you want to clear (zero or randomize) all RAM that is not currently allocated. The way to do this is to fill it with something and then de-allocate it (if necessary).

Here are my solutions to your privacy concerns:

#1. Set your BIOS to do a complete memory test (by de-selecting fast POST, quick startup or whatever yours is called). This will force the BIOS to fill your RAM completely 3 times when rebooting. If this is not done, then rebooting does not clear your RAM, no matter what anyone has told you.

#2. Assuming the reason you want to wipe RAM is to hide evidence of recent activities, you probably also want to disable hibernation (from the Windows Screen Saver / Power Settings dialogue utility). If your system is set to hibernate, then it will dump all contents of RAM to disk upon hibernation, which creates a perfect picture for a forensic analyst to see what you've been up to.

#3. Again, assuming privacy is what you're after, you might want to encrypt your page file. BCWipe has a utility called CryptoSwap which will keep your swap/page file encrypted. This way, anything that gets paged out from RAM to your hard drive will be encrypted. Good stuff.

#4. If you're super paranoid (or you just want to protect data on a portable system), you might also want to encrypt your entire system with the open source program TrueCrypt. It's very good at what it does, but be careful, cause if you forget your password, your data will be lost for good.

#5. Finally, getting back to the original question, if you want to clear un-allocated RAM for privacy reasons or just to try and give some other application a chance to load into RAM instead of getting paged straight away, I would follow the advice from an Experts-Exchange thread I was reading:

Groover2000 wrote (on Experts-Exchange.com):

Freeing some RAM:

Open up a text editor and put in the following:

FreeMem = Space(120000000) For 256 MEg of RAM or more.

FreeMem = Space(90000000) For 128 meg-196 meg.

FreeMem = Space(48000000) For 64 meg-96 meg.

FreeMem = Space(20000000) For 32 meg-48meg.

Now save as Memory.vbs and then click on it. This will help free some RAM.

If you get error messages decrease the numeric value. It should never be more than the half of your RAM installed.

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You could add more FreeMem (Vista) or ClearMem (XP) lines with decreasing values to get down to the small bits. It will perform each command in order. You may need to download FreeMem / ClearMem from Microsoft.

ClearMem syntax:

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Clearmem.exe [-q] [-d] [-mnum] [-pnum] [-w] [-tnum] [-?]

Where:

-?

displays command-line help.

-q

quiet mode - nothing printed.

-d

debug break on entry into and exit from application.

-mnum

number of megabytes to allocate. The default is to use all physical memory.

-pnum

number of pages to read. The default is 63 but you can specify few pages.

-w

write to the virtual memory section.

-b

read and write the virtual memory section.

-tnum

times to touch a page.

Note

ClearMem runs with the following defaults: clearmem -p63 -t1

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If you want fast access to your script, you might either create a shortcut on your desktop and assign it a hotkey (right-click the shortcut and choose "Properties") or you could run it from an AutoHotKey (or some other high-level scripting/convenience engine) script and put that in your startup folder in your start menu so that it will load when you log in.

As far as I understand, the ClearMem thing will serve the needs of the security-conscious as well as those who are just trying to free up some RAM to be allocated by a program they haven't loaded yet.

Keep in mind that when you flush all your RAM to disk (which is what this will do), it will immediately slow down any applications which were using that memory b/c now their data/instructions will be using a much slower storage medium, so this tool should not be used with the expectation of boosting your overall system responsiveness -- only if you want to clear the memory FOR something, or you want whatever was in RAM to be removed.

Honestly, I'm not absolutely certain what this program does TO the memory when it flushes everything to disk. If you want to be really sure that memory is "cleared", then you may want to write a script that tries to do a really big calculation with floating point numbers (perhaps just after running FreeMem) until it uses up all your RAM trying to do the calculation.

I hope this info was helpful.

Answer 4

Start->Control Panel->System->Advanced->Perfomance->Settings->Advanced->Virtual Memory->Change. In the window which will show up after you clicked on Change you can change a size of paging file for each disk or turn it off. Contrary to popular opinion, disabling the pagefile will NOT disable virtual memory. Virtual memory is not the pagefile. It is an essential component of the Windows system and it can never be disabled. Virtual memory is not an extension to physical memory but a system that combines physical RAM and many files on the hard disk into a unit that combines the best features of both and minimizing the limitations. Unless you have a specific need, and you understand what you are doing, system settings are best left on default. Windows designers understand Windows better than you do.