Snake Oil

[Nurian]

I talked to someone the other day who told me his computer was really slow. In my troubleshooting I found out he had a piece of software on his computer that I swear made my brain BSOD when he told me what it was for.

ME: It does what?
USER: It defrags my RAM.
ME: It...it defrags...your RAM? Not your hard drive, right? Your RAM?
USER: Right. My RAM. Don't you have that on all your computers?
ME: Yes, we do. It's called Windows....

I swear I thought he was joking. Vision of being sent out for "chem light batteries" danced through my head.

[TheSHAD0W]

As a matter of fact... Windows 95 and 98 run much better with that type of software. Windows ME actually *requires* that software in order to be usable! (If anyone here has to deal with ME, look around for "RamIdle" and you'll be surprised how much it improves its operation.) The software basically forces Windows to reallocate memory by periodically allocating as much as it can. A real kludge - but by golly, it helps.

[Nurian]

But this was for a machine with Windows 7. It was less then 3 months old. It just seemed so weird. Like a flashlight for an ice scraper.

[Geek King]

As a matter of fact... Windows 95 and 98 run much better with that type of software. Windows ME actually *requires* that software in order to be usable! (If anyone here has to deal with ME, look around for "RamIdle" and you'll be surprised how much it improves its operation.) The software basically forces Windows to reallocate memory by periodically allocating as much as it can. A real kludge - but by golly, it helps.

The only reason you're going to need this is if you run a lot of programs that don't clean up after themselves (release allocated RAM/Virtual memory) AND have a deep-rooted need to never reboot your computer.

I can't speak for Win-ME, or the server versions, but every other iteration of Windows for desktops I've used since `95, slowdowns caused by low available memory (when proper amounts of RAM are installed) are almost always traced to sloppy programs. Games tend to be particularly bad on this, but other software--even by good companies, can do the same thing.

[Jay 2K Winger]

Make sure that guy's bought his CD Rewinder and headlight fluid. He's gonna need those.

[Hyndis]

Memory leaks are the plague of programming. Even great games, like Age of Empires II or Supreme Commander, had horrific memory leaks.

These days the OS is good at clearing the memory if you close a program. If the program is still running it could end up hogging all of the memory and filling up the page file, causing the computer to crash, but if you exit the program before that happens the OS should then clear the memory automatically.

[protege]

The only thing I can think of that would make Windows ME work better...is a large sledgehammer, preferably a 40-pound fence maul

[Racket_Man]

The only thing I can think of that would make Windows ME work better...is a large sledgehammer, preferably a 40-pound fence maul

NO NO NO!!!!! yes it gets frustration out in a physical manner BUT explosives are more fun. a couple of M-80s should do it.

OR find the nearest 200 foot cliff

OR run it over with a bulldozer or large Bigfoot type truck

oppppsss talking about software here....... well a large firecracker or a decent sized bottlerocket would do fine

[TheSHAD0W]

The only reason you're going to need this is if you run a lot of programs that don't clean up after themselves (release allocated RAM/Virtual memory) AND have a deep-rooted need to never reboot your computer.

Well, if that's true, most everything in Win 9x leaked a bit, because running it over a day without rebooting resulted in slow operation without a "ram defragmenter". With ME, just doing normal things with basic default tools (IE, file explorer) would result in a slowdown inside of 10 minutes. With RamIdle (the defragger I used to use) I would tend to go a week between reboots, even with ME (unheard of!)

I also suspect the same is true with progs under XP and newer, but the OS just handles it better.

[Mamochan]

I do love how marketing can call things whatever want. Ram idle isn't really defragmenting your memory. it is just recovering wasted memory. Defraging memory... would be quite illogical...

[DGoddessChardonnay]

The only thing I can think of that would make Windows ME work better...is a large sledgehammer, preferably a 40-pound fence maul

That sounds like my brother's old PC. I thought of doing that, but then I let an old friend talk me into donating it to a guy he knew that refurbishes old computers.

But then ME didn't work well even when it was new . . . it did basically what it wanted to do, not necessarily what the user was trying to do.

[mhkohne]

But this was for a machine with Windows 7. It was less then 3 months old. It just seemed so weird. Like a flashlight for an ice scraper.

It's almost always counter productive to try to outsmart the memory management on a modern (XP onward) version of Windows - they are real protected mode operating systems, and ram utilities like that just make your 'free' memory appaer larger by forcing the OS to swap active stuff out to disk. On XP that's bad enough because it will have to load it back in when you switch to that program, but in Vista/Win7 it's much worse because the OS likes to use extra RAM to cache disk files you are likely to want soon in memory - if you force it to have 'free' RAM, then you've also dumped the disk cache, and it gets that much slower to do anything.

[lineswine]

Windows ME...according to the folk at TSC, the "ME" stood for "Mistake Edition", or "Many Errors".
I remember the days of the horror known as "DOS 4.0" <shudders>

[Jay 2K Winger]

Windows ME...according to the folk at TSC, the "ME" stood for "Mistake Edition", or "Many Errors".
I remember the days of the horror known as "DOS 4.0" <shudders>

I always thought of ME as "Miserable Edition."

And thinking of ME, always made me think of this.

[lordlundar]

It's funny, when I worked retail Vista had come out and the Microsoft rep was touting it as the best thing ever (as expected, it was his job) and every time I would say how his company doesn't have a spotless record. He of course would question it and I would mention Windows ME. The response was "well we don't talk about that anymore."