Reboot? Haha, who needs it?

[Jlo555]

All I really do with that computer is exchange files over my family's wireless network. Other than that, the computer doesn't get used that often. So, I suppose I could keep it running for a couple of months at this rate, and I would probably still have 80%+ resources.

On my primary desktop computer which I rebuilt about a month ago, I usually start out with about 83% system resources. (Stupid HP Printer Drivers, they take up nearly 8% upon startup.) If I am using the computer nonstop, I'll probably reboot after 4-5 hours of consistent use, which is when I've trimmed the system resource level down to 40-50%. I suppose I could let it go longer, but rebooting on this computer takes away 30 seconds of my life, so it doesn't really bother me.

eidenk - In that case, that's very impressive you got your computer to boot with 75% free resources. I would never even consider running that many apps upon startup on a win9x box.

I actually did an experiment a while back where I opened as many programs as I possibly could under 98SE, to see if how low I could get the resources without seeing a BSOD, or freeze. The computer froze after I started Outlook XP and the resources were down to 17%. I did the same experiment on a Windows Me computer and managed to get the resources down to less than 1%, and nothing happened. I was shocked after all of the horror stories I've heard from people that use WinMe. IMO, it's not that bad of an OS. But I guess that's a bit off topic...

[eidenk]

It's an ME box I must say and the total available size for resources is I believe (but I am not exactly sure) a little bit bigger than in 98SE. So I probably would be lower to startup with resources on 98SE than I am on ME with the same load. Also I did like you, I disabled or removed all the MS services that aren't absolutely needed for my purposes without doing any miracle of exotic stripping.

What's nice with ME over 98SE I noticed is that it is much more stable when in low resources situation than 98SE is. With 98SE you can get stability issues when under 15-20% of free resources left whereas ME does not exhibit wrong behaviour even at only 1%. In fact Windows ME will abrupty crash if you go below 0% whereas 98SE will begin to exhibit an increasingly unstable behavior as free resources go below 15-20%.

Sometimes I manage to free a few % of resources by killing and restarting the Explorer.

I have often wondered if certain system files could be tweaked as to maybe increase the available size for resources by simply changing a few strings but I have no clue as to where to look at.

Also there is no tool or trick I know of that would allow to free the areas of memory marked as used by resources when they aren't used anymore and haven't been properly freed by apps. I doubt such a tool exist otherwise it would probably be quite well known.

I know one interesting tool that actually shows in details what resources are used by apps and modules : http://www.japheth.de/Download/TaskList.ZIP

PS : I have also an old but good HP LaserJet IIIP whose drivers are always loaded and that I forgot to include in my above list but I don't think those take 8% on my system and I haven't been able to locate them in the above app.

[HyperHacker]

All those memory optimizers do is allocate a bunch of memory, then free it, forcing Windows to move things to the page file and such to make room. If the OS is no good at memory management, that still won't make a huge difference.

Also, it's pretty easy to get a huge uptime if you just hook the computer up, turn it on, and never actually use it.

[Kelsenellenelvian]

I like to use ramidle pro just to display free ram amount and such. I disable the "optimize" part.

[eidenk]

I like to use ramidle pro just to display free ram amount and such. I disable the "optimize" part.

I have 512 MB of RAM and I do use the optimizer part with the following settings : Autofree 10 MB each 1 minute if RAM is below 50 % and also 100 MB minimum free RAM and 350 MB as a target. CPU usage disabled. It works remarkably well.

I use version 2 I have from a cover CD.

[wizardofwindows]

i use the ram idle fuction in tweak powerpack 2005 it seems to work abit on pc running less than 256mb

[Fredledingue]

The more you have ram, the less you need to worry about it.

I remember when I moved from 32 to 96 Mb, It was like a new life!

Today with the same OS but a much faster computer and 512 Mb of ram, I even stopped thinking about it. Ram freer grew old because they take ages to unload the memory. I prefer not losing time.

W98 work better on new hardware.

The type of software is also important:

Sometimes I ran with 1% of ram and the os kept running fine...because all the softwares I use are safe, tested and well-designed.

If developer were smart, even w95 could run for weeks without a crash.

[colemancb]

my computer has been on since before you were born.

how about that?

[Jlo555]

wow, 16 years huh.

Oh well, I had to restart the computer because I was installing a bunch of stuff on it, including avg and ms office. So it's back to 0days 0hours 0minutes and 0seconds.

[Chozo4]

I'd second the comments on just using stable apps and having the cache well tuned. My win98 system runs as a gaming, programming environment (Web Based), and http/ftp server.

... I've hit a good 23 days uptime on my w98 system so farof constant abuse.