Why Memory Optimizers and RAM Boosters Are Useless

Many companies wish to sell you “memory optimizers,” mostly as part of “PC optimization” programs. These programs are worse than unfair and such programs take advantage of uninformed users, origination fake promises about boosting performance. In reality, your mechanism knows how to manage RAM on its own. It will use RAM to boost your computer’s performance.

Is Your Computer’s RAM Filling Up?

Memory optimizers are formed on a misunderstanding. In reality, modern operating systems are graceful good at managing memory on their own. That 3 GB of used RAM doesn’t indispensably indicate waste. Instead, your computer uses your RAM to cache data for faster access. And when you need the data again, your computer doesn’t have to hit your hard drive — it can just load the files from RAM.

Even if your RAM is completely full and your computer needs more of it to run an application, your computer can instantly discard the cached data from your RAM and use that space for the application. There’s no point in having RAM sit empty — if it’s empty, it’s being wasted and if it’s full, there’s a good chance it can help speed up program loading times and anything else that would use your computer’s hard drive. Notice that very little RAM is actually “free” in the screenshot below. The RAM is being used as a cache.

In past, full RAM did indicate a problem and modern computers generally have enough RAM for most users. Even low-end computers generally ship with 4GB of RAM, which should be more than enough unless you’re doing intensive gaming, running multiple virtual machines, or editing videos.

Even if RAM was a problem for you, there’s no reason to use a memory optimizer. Memory optimizers are snake oil that is useless at best and harmful at worst.

How Memory Optimizers Work?

When you use a memory optimizer, you’ll see your computer’s RAM usage go down. This may seem like an easy win. Memory optimizers actually work in one of two ways:

o Call the EmptyWorkingSet Windows API function, forcing running applications to write their working memory to the Windows page file.

o Quickly allocate a large amount of memory to themselves, forcing Windows to discard cached data and write application data to the page file. Then deallocate the memory, leaving it empty.

Both of these tricks will indeed free up RAM, making it empty. However, all this does is slow things down. And also these programs free up fast memory by forcing data you need onto slower memory, where it will have to be moved back to fast memory again.

If Windows needs RAM, it will push data to the page file or discard cached data, anyway. This all happens automatically when it needs to. Like PC cleaning apps, memory optimizers are a scam. They appear to be doing something positive to people who don’t understand how memory management works.

How to Actually “Optimize” Your Memory?

If you do want to have more available RAM, skip the memory optimizer. Instead, try to get rid of running applications you don’t need — purge unnecessary programs from your system tray, disable useless startup programs, and so on. And if you do need more RAM for what you do, try buying some more RAM. RAM is pretty cheap and it’s not too hard to install it yourself using one of the RAM installing guides available online.

So memory optimizers can free up some of your PC’s RAM. However, that’s a bad thing — you want your computer to use its RAM to speed things up. There’s no point in having free memory.