Clearing the Cobwebs from Memory

Memory can be a lot harder than the hard drive to monitor and clean. For one thing, everything disappears from memory the second you shut the system down — it’s not permanent. Before you begin to think that you can clear memory by shutting your Windows system down often enough, however, you need to know that Windows fills part of memory the second you start the system and every time you start or use an application. Memory is a precious commodity to track. Fortunately, anyone can see how their system uses memory by relying on the Task Manager. Figure 1.2 shows an example of how the Task Manager lists the applications running on your machine. The “Using Task Manager” section of Chapter 7 describes how you can perform this task.

Figure 1.2 Check which applications are running on your system using Task Manager.

At some point, you’ll know that some applications are using more than their fair share of memory and other applications shouldn’t even be running. This information is invaluable because it gives you a starting point for clearing memory and making more available to the applications you do use. Memory starvation is the biggest reason applications run slowly and it can be a contributing factor in application crashes. The “Using MSCONFIG” section of Chapter 7 provides some of the best advice that a novice can use to clear enough memory to make their Windows system run well again.

As your skills improve, you might want to tackle the “Clearing Unnecessary Services” and “Modifying Network Connections” sections as well. Microsoft usually creates a default Windows setup that includes a number of services that you won’t need because they have the corporate environment in mind. For example, you don’t necessarily need to have some network support features installed when you don’t attach your machine to a network. Even when you access a network, you can often modify the connections or perform other optimizations to keep memory usage down. Remember that the whole idea is to make more memory available to applications that actually need it.