I suspect any perceived improvements is a result of the placebo effect. I don’t know much about the inner workings of Microsoft’s memory management architecture, but I do know that from my numerous layman observations, my system’s performance correlated most accurately with the total commit charge, NOT the memory consumption of individual applications as listed in the Task Manager. Looking at the screenshot Samer posted, I see that the commit charge (displayed in the statusbar) went from 974 to 966 MB. One interpretation of this is that Minimem only effectively reduced Samer’s PC by 8 MB when all is said and done. Furthermore, it is tuggling with Windows’ own memory manager to optimize memory in the background, possibly introducing more overhead.

If you don’t believe me, here’s a test that anyone can do: (1) Restart your PC and load as many programs as you can until your system starts to feel sluggish. It’s even better if you can do this on a dinosaur (e.g., Pentium 4 with 256MB of RAM). (2) Now restart your PC again, install a memory sweeper utility, and proceed to repeat step 1. I would be surprised if anyone would be able to load more programs without slowing down the system by using a memory sweeper utility.

There’s a good reason why we have adages like TANSTAAFL (also this and this) and the first law of thermodynamics. So remember, when resource A in your system decreases, it didn’t just magically vanish out of thin air; it merely got redistributed to resource B. In effect, your system may have improved in one area, but adversely affected in the other (in my case, increased hard disk thrashing).

With all this said, I do appreciate Kerkia taking the time to produce a GUI and offering it up for free to the community. I guess if it works for you — and confirmed not a placebo effect — then more power to ya. YMMV.

Tom

Windows already as an efficient system for trimming the memory usage of applications when needed, and it has access to data structures and functions that are not available to any application. What is available to Minimem is crude in comparison. On the plus side the program allows intelligent user input into this process, and that could be potentially useful. But that would be conditional on the user having a working understanding of how Windows manages memory and is able to intelligently guide the process. Unfortunately, very few who use the program will will have that kind of knowledge. And most who think they do don’t. In the hands of the average user this program is more likely to impair performance than improve it. Improved documentation by the author is unlikely to help much.

Larry Miller
Microsoft MCSA

Watching this ‘Do it’s Thing’, it seems to be doing what SweepRAM does, only on an automatic 30-second schedule.
[Samer’s review of SweepRAM is at http://www.freewaregenius.com/2007/07/06/sweepram/
SystemExplorer has a similar ‘Processor Memory Usage Cleanup’ option under it’s ‘System Utilities’ menu.
Both of these do a ‘One-Shot Clean-Up’ – Launch it, it Auto-Cleans & then Exits from memory – Essentially booting almost everything into Virtual Memory, and letting the program ‘Take Back’ what it REALLY needs.

I already have SweepRAM clean up my memory as the last step of my boot process, which really helps, and periodically throughout the day, I’ll do another ‘Sweep’ manually (via ‘KeyBreeze’ Shortcut); I’m a little uncomfortable of having a program choose WHEN to ‘Sweep’ – When I control it, I know I’m not in the middle of something important.

I’ll run it through some tests today, during large downloads, Streaming Video/Audio, Defragging the Hard Drive on a ‘Test System’! – It will be interesting to see if anything else is affected during the Clean-Up!