Is Cacheman similar to Process Tamer?

[superboyac]

Is Cacheman the same kind of program as Process Tamer?  Or are they for different things?

There is a cool, very interesting device I just found:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16812197002

It attaches to the back of any internal hard drive and converts it to a usb drive.  That's freakin cool.  However, a couple of the users mentioned something about getting errors, and someone else responded by saying cacheman would take care of it.  So it got me thinking about process tamer and if they're the same thing.

Also, someone else said to format drives using Quick Format for NTFS because it's better somehow.  Is this true?  Whenever I format, I do the long way, not the Quick Format.  I always thought it was a better format, but I have no reason to believe that.

[f0dder]

That adapter looks pretty neat for us people that juggle a whole bunch of disks every now and then. I think it's been mentioned here at DC before.

Haven't looked into CacheMan, but since it includes a "optimize RAM" feature I'll stay away from it. Some of the cache-related tweaks it can make are worth investigating, but I wouldn't keep the program "running and tweaking".

Quick Format is faster, Full Format gives the harddisk a bit of workout. I tend to do full format (and with the bootcd/floppy/usb/whatever tools from the HDD vendor) when I get a new harddrive, and then mostly stick to quick formats because, well, they're faster. Every once in a while if I need to do major changes, I'll do a full format to give my drive a bit of excercise.

[mouser]

we've talked about those cute usb adapters before, but remember you can get a usb2 enclosure for about the same price which would be more secure for daily use (that usb adapter gizmo might be good for quick testing stuff though).

[superboyac]

Sorry, I can't find the thread on the USB adapters.  Anyway, yes mouser, you're correct that it costs about the same as a good enclosure (~$25).  I still would get just because it's so handy.  I'd stick it in my toolkit just in case something happened.  I would never use it as a permanant connection.

fodder, I'll take a look at cacheman a little more.  I don't know much about processes and cache, but maybe I should learn.  I understand process tamer is one of mouser's more popular software.

[Darwin]

I own a license for CachemanXP and haven't had it installed in over a year. I found that I was obsessing about "free RAM" when it was running (not its fault, per se). The surprise came when I uninstalled it - my computer felt much more responsive and the world didn't come to an end when free RAM dipped below 70MB (with Cacheman installed I was getting antsy when free RAM dropped below 300MB - I'm on a notebook with a gig of RAM)...

It's abandonware, anyway, as far as I can tell. There have been no updates in over a year and version 1.2 was promised for November 2004 and version 2 for Feb. 2005. They're still officially at versoin 1.1.2... though a beta version of 1.2 is available. If you visit the user forum, there are one or two people who still post occasionally, but overall one gets the sensation of being in a ghost town.

Somewhere there is a thread that discusses the pros/cons of these kind of apps but I can't find it.

[Darwin]

Sorry, I followed the link to this thread from the "new" posts section and failed to pay attention enough to notice the original question about Cacheman and ProcessTamer being similar. I would have to say no. I have ProcessTamer installed and running - it's purpose is to monitor and control how much of the CPU running processes co-opt for themselves. Cacheman is much more about controlling free RAM. It does, as fodder points out, feature a number of cache tweaks, but I never noticed much of a difference in performance in playing around with them.

So, to recap, despite its name Cacheman/CachemanXP is a realtime RAM usage monitor/tweaker that features some cache tweak settings while ProcessTamer is a realtime process monitor...

[superboyac]

Thanks Darwin, that's good information to know.