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Must-have apps in the System tray?

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f0dder:
Curt: it's snake-oil... all that those "memory optimizers" do is to allocate a truckload of memory, forcing windows to page out other applications to disk. You might as well NOT run crap like that, and have windows automatically do the paging as necessary. Using them is detrimental to performance, as they tend to force more stuff out of memory than is necessary.

urlwolf:
I use opera as my main browser. The widgets are always on top.
The timer for example is nice because I can increase the font size with + and - (a lot more customizable than any other floating clock/timer I have seen).

Opera uses a lot of memory when I have many tabs open, but the widgets theirselves, not at all. And even opera rarely goes over 100Mb + 100mb virtual memory. FF would do 150 easily.

Curt:
I have used this machine for three weeks without any RAM freeing program, and for one week with, and performance has improved because of FreeRAM XP PRO. That is a fact from experience - experience from both my previous and my present machine, not some "crap" theory I might have read elsewhere, and not about "those" "memory optimizers", but experience with FreeRAM XP PRO on my stations.

Curt:
... opera rarely goes over 100Mb + 100mb virtual memory. FF would do 150 easily. -urlwolf (April 16, 2007, 05:11 PM)
--- End quote ---

I tried Opera again, this time version 9.2, for two days, but the only skin I liked was buggy, so I removed it and went back to AOL as default (thanks, app103!). The reason is that I get a lot of e-mails with links, and I want a browser that will open these links fast. I have no need for Opera to be extended with this or that - if I know I am to browse for music / video / pictures, I will use Firefox, and to seek for informations I will use IE7 - because in my setup the third Internet browser must be 'slim' - and look pretty.  Opera is kind of slim, but I don't like the look of the standard version and I didn't find a useable skin that I like.

f0dder:
It's more likely that your performance boost has been because of the phase of the moon, really.

FreeRAM XP PRO still uses the crappy old technique of alloc-a-big-block-and-release, which is utterly stupid. It's "global memory compression" (which has nothing to do with compression and should be renamed "global working-set trim") is slightly more intelligent, based on Process Explorer I'd say that it iterates the processes in the system and does SetProcessWorkingSetSize(process, -1, -1)... which is basically what windows does in a low-memory situation.

The only situation where this kind of application could be helpful is if you're launching another application that allocated memory depending on how much memory is free... but that's not an all-too common practice, and for the applications that do it, you'll be better off shutting down some applications (you don't want too much stuff running on a low-end system if you're going to play intensive games, for instance).

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