Do you still remember the useful program called Minimem which I’ve introduced a month ago? Minimem is a memory optimization solution that can reduce the memory footprint of any application. All you need to do is to select the process that you want Minimem to optimize and also the interval time. This means that you have to keep Minimem running in background in order to optimize the memory of a process.

Instead of installing another software and adding one more program to list of background running programs, here is another alternative which I personally think that it can be better than Minimem if you’ve configured it properly. It is small, fast, free, and no configuration required!

CleanMem is a tool that Shane wrote for his customers and have used it on their systems for the past few years, and decided to release it on the net. The program will install and set it to run every 30 min via the windows task scheduler. You can change this to any amount of time you like by simply going to the task scheduler in windows and changing any of the options you like.
Install it and your done! The program doesn’t run in the back ground, once it does its job it closes and doesn’t run again until the task scheduler runs it.

The program is very simple to operate as it will run and clean the memory out of all processes it can, without any user input. CleanMem doesn’t work like other memory cleaners that do nothing but force windows to free up memory by using up all the available memory. This old trick then causes your system to lag big time!

Cleanmem works in a matter of about 5 sec. It uses a windows API call that is in Windows 2000, XP, 2003, Vista & 2008 that tells windows to cleanup the workspace of a processes thus freeing up any memory the process no longer needs. Other memory cleaners end up forcing the memory into the page file slowing down your system. This tool does not. The API call frees up unused memory from programs, when a program needs the memory again it can simply take it back instead of forcing the memory out of ram and into the page file.

A good example is my laptop. As you can see at the image below, Firefox is taking up 200MB, JDownloader 50MB, svchost.exe 32MB and so on. After running CleanMem, every process memory usage has been reduced tremendously (Firefox only takes up 8MB, JDownloader at 4MB) and wont grow again until it actually is used. The same goes for all processes.

Before and After running CleanMem

If a processes needs more memory it gets it back in a second. CleanMem have it set to run every 30 min in the windows task scheduler. You won’t notice any performance hit of any kind even when pushing your system to the max playing a heavy 3D game (Shane, author of CleanMem tested playing Age Of Conan).

CleanMem Windows Scheduled Tasks

So basically set it and forget it, memory leaks from programs will be a thing of the past with this tool. If there a process that you don’t want CleanMem to optimize the memory, you can simply put the process name on CleanMem Ignore List (cleanmem_ignore_list.txt)

CleanMem works on Windows 2000, XP, 2003, Vista, & 2008 (32bit & 64bit). There are 2 versions of CleanMem, the installer or portable version. The installer version will install it in Program Files and will automatically configure Windows Task Manager to run it every 30 seconds. The portable version only contains one executable file for people who wish to run Cleanmem off an external USB flash drive or CD or even across the network.

[ Download CleanMem v1.2.1 Installer | Portable ]

Technorati Tags: , , , ,