I remember that back in 2005 or so, there was a freeware standalone executable that could, among other things, compact/defragment the computer's RAM, or swap out applications not in use. Any ideas?

The problem I'm trying to solve is that on a Windows XP Pro SP2 laptop with 3G of RAM, the cache seems to get busted after I open a number of memory-hungry applications (Firefox, Outlook), even if I close them. By "busted" I mean that disk reads are no longer cached.

Example: If I just boot up Windows and start Excel, it grinds the hard drive for 3-4 seconds, then loads. If I quit it and start it again, it loads
up almost instantly. All the files it needs to read off disk are cached.

Now if I start Firefox with 10-15 tabs and do the same Excel test, it grinds the hard drive for 3 seconds every time. I wouldn't mind this about Excel, but when I'm developing and compiling programs with large dependency chains, it's painful to wait every time for half a minute until everything is read off the disk, instead of just a few seconds if reads were cached.

Does anyone have an idea what's causing this?

I already applied the hack #4 (Kernel Paging and Cache Tuning) from http://kadaitcha.cx/performance.html to increase the cache size, but that didn't help. Also, I posted the question to microsoft.public.windowsxp.general but got mostly off-topic replies.

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I dont know if this could help but here goes with some of this sites resources.

Have you tried to defrag your Page file http://www.portablefreeware.com/index.php?id=766

Have you tried the app Called "Ultimate Windows Tweaker"?http://www.portablefreeware.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=4&t=4300&hilit=tweak

or any of the Windows Tweaking software found on this Website, usually specific to XP?http://www.portablefreeware.com/index.php?id=501

There are others http://www.portablefreeware.com/?sc=160

You might try using a Registry Defrag program http://www.portablefreeware.com/index.php?id=1130
or even Defraggeler http://www.portablefreeware.com/index.php?id=1418
Defraggler could defrag specific files like your Firefox etc

There are Firefox add-ons to speed up firefox and reduce ram overhead

Also if you are using Library based Software including .net software, Java, etc each library software uses its own full copy of the runtime library and will not share so each one will use up an enormous amount of RAM

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not sure if this is a good solution but if you have enough ram, you could make ramdisk
viewtopic.php?f=1&t=4914

this run a bit faster but ugh... not best solution but it works :S

Hard Disks: Slower and Larger
RAM Memory: Faster and Shorter

Now, You now what to do!

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I AM,YOU ARE,WE ARE WHEN WE ARE RIGHT. emucr,softpedia,and HokutoNoKen and Speakonia on YT