Messing With Windows Memory Management March 22, 2001 O.K. all you wanna be tweakers; get ready, get set, and lets go. Win98 and WinMe had substantial improvements made to the way they manage memory as compared to Win95. So the first thing we want to check is that our settings are letting Win98 & WinMe do their job when it comes to memory management. In Win98 Click on Control Panel/System/Performance/Virtual Memory. Make sure that Let Windows manage my virtual memory settings is selected. In Win95 the tweak was to select Let me specify my own virtual memory settings and then set the minimum and maximum at the same which was about l.5 times your memory. We defintely do not want to do this in Win98 & WinMe. If you make any changes you will need to reboot. While you have the Performance tab opened make sure there is a statement to the effect: "Your system is configured for optimal performance". (If you have a note that says your system is not running at optimal performance - you've got a serious problems with one or more of your drivers). Next step is to download the freebie tweaker package Cacheman 4.1 and install it. Do not select the feature to start whenever Windows starts. When asked if you want to run the program click on Yes, the program opens on the "Information" window; review info if you so desire. Click on Preset in the Toolbar and select the version of Windows you have. Now select one of: Average User, 3D Games, CD Writer, Low Memory System, Multimedia, Power User, Sound Recording. Select the category that most often describes how you use the computer (read the help file for more information). Move onto the Settings tab. At bottom check off Conservative Swap File Usage and Unload Dlls from memory. Under the Options tab make sure Load Cacheman with Windows is not selected (unless you want to use Cacheman's monitoring features). Exit the program and if asked too restart - do it. You can now uninstall Cacheman or if you have lots of disk space leave it on your hard drive just in case you want to change the settings it has made in the future. You can see the settings Cacheman makes by going to: Control Panel/System/Performance/File System ; it should read Cacheman Optimization. Type msconfig in run, select System.ini, scroll down to [vcache],click on the + and those are settings cacheman made/adjusted. And finally this last little goodie; if you are currently using Win98 or WinMe and running either freeware or shareware programs that claim to manage memory better than Windows - turn them off. They are using resources and they don't do a better job than windows. I tell you this after having forked over money for one such program myself. You don't need to uninstall such programs; just don't leave them running in the background. If you have a memory display in your taskbar and on rare occasions notice it is getting down under 10% you can fire up your "memory management" program and let it flush out memory for you; and then shut it off. Hope you find this useful and have fun tweaking.