FAST Defrag Standard
Posted on: 12/04/2003 12:00 AM

Memory management is something some of us have to deal with on a daily basis. Not all of us have PC’s with loads of RAM installed and not everyone’s work PC is a beast either. Trying to multitask on a machine with only 384Megabytes of RAM can be frustrating at times especially with having 5 or 6 applications loaded such as Outlook, Lotus Notes, Access etc, that use alot of RAM, quickly becomes an issue. The issue is typically unresolved when applications are closed. Some data is cached in RAM for later use which takes a while for the operating system to release and some programs just leak memory which can cause crashes. It can get ugly real quick on a low end machine, but if it’s all you have to work with then there’s only one thing to do… manage the RAM!
FAST Defrag can definitely help you in this area.

Install was quick and easy. It asks the standard install questions for install location and icon placements. Uninstall was painless.
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FAST Defrag can monitor your RAM in the background and can sit in your systray if you desire. It will work to free your RAM while you work in your applications or, if you need RAM now simply right click on the systray icon or maximize FAST Defrag and hit the “clean” button and it will crank away to release all the RAM held in limbo. But be cautioned that the cleaning engine is not discretionary when you use the clean button. It will free RAM but programs may re-load components back into memory again. The application best works idle in the systray so it can release only what is necessary.

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FAST Defrag has several options to play with that can help maximize your system RAM. One thing to note is that it has 2 engines, the AMF and SMF. The engines do the SAME thing using a different algorithm, though the AMF engine is faster. The defragging process takes seconds if you force the clean, otherwise it just sits idle and uses almost no CPU cycles at all. The other options allow you to enable the memory guardian while idle, and set “conservative swap file usage” which doesn’t affect NT based PC’s.

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FAST Defrag does the job, and when used properly can help you alleviate your system performance issues.

(5/5) Stars

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