Although Windows kernel does a pretty good job with managing the physical RAM on your system, you get to have a say in this as well. Releasing locked RAM is actually an old practice of power users, whenever an app that deserves more attention is launched. Freeing up the memory may be the catalyst required for a specific software to run more energetically on your system.

The list of solutions available to the average Joe is quite long and features both shareware and freeware items, all of them designed for the single purpose of releasing the RAM on the system. Generally, the operation is simple and consists in moving the information in physical RAM to system pagefile, making more room for new software.

Fresh RAM is designed for the same end result and comes at a $9.95 price, but can be tested to its fullest even if the trial version limits its usage to only 30 tryouts. But all the options are active as there is no feature limitation during the evaluation period.

The application comes with a nice interface that dives directly into the options. To the left, there are the menus while the right side of the screen gives free access to settings area. System RAM Optimization menu is the first in the list and its screen makes available information such as optimization status, broken into categories (free memory percentage as well as physical amount and percentage of used memory, plus total amount of RAM available on the system).

Everything is automatic when it comes to RAM release. The engine has four gears, depending on the type of job you want to be done on the system. The Leakage Optimization choice is for a fast repair, Economic Optimization (quick RAM optimization) makes for a slightly more thorough operation, Medium Optimization (thoroughness level increases a notch) is the third option while Engine Optimization, which takes the most amount of time but is also the best, closes the list.

A visual display of RAM usage and availability is present in the screen displaying the status in two colors. Unfortunately, you cannot change them and the default has to do it for you. Left hand sidebar also contains the status of the system RAM and will be shown regardless of the menu you choose.

Fresh RAM sports a set of tweaks that may come in usefully on XP (there is no support for Vista). As such, you can enable UDMA66 support on Intel chipset systems, disable 8.3 filename creation or NTFS last access update in case you have a large hard drive or you can enable CMOS/Real Time Clock Priority Boost for performance gain under XP. It is not much, but on XP systems it is quite enough to make a difference.

The last entry in the application's menu is related to boosting your Internet connection. For this, the application appeals to a separate tool (Internet Cell Boost) that will open in a separate window. For an easy job, Fresh RAM makes available a set of Internet connections for you to choose from. After this, a click on Boost Internet Speed button in the lower left corner of the screen is sufficient to start the optimization process. However, we noticed no dramatic improvement after the optimization process as the connection speed test returned very close results, with insignificant differences.

Regarding the RAM optimization, as compared to the last reviewed version, there is clearly an improvement, not necessarily related to the interface, but to the engine, as well. After the optimization, the RAM release stayed at almost the same value and for as long as the optimization status was at its 100% peak, the RAM level was within its best parameters. Task Manager agrees with Fresh RAM readings as it corroborated the information.

However, I did notice an 1% change in used memory, although the system was put to absolutely no stress whatsoever. But this was the only abnormality noted during our testing.

Unlike other similar software on the market Fresh RAM does not allow the user the set up of a chunk of memory to be released, nor does it take the optimization matter into its own hands and intervene whenever a certain threshold is exceeded. It would be of great help to have some scheduling possibilities and configure a specific event to trigger software's automatic optimization. On the downside, RAM optimization is available for as long as you have the software open as, once it is closed, the system is on its own. And since Fresh RAM does not feature any scheduling options, there is no way to place it in system tray and watch over memory proper usage.

The Good

Fresh RAM comes at a very accessible price and features some interesting options for optimizing XP operating system's default settings. RAM release is made responsibly and you benefit from four different optimization presets.

It is extremely easy to use and optimization is preserved for as long as the software is running.

The Bad

There is no support for Vista although with the SuperFetch feature enabled it would not do too much good, but disabling it would make Fresh RAM feasible.

User's input is minimum and you don't get to set the amount of RAM to be released, a fact that comes as a downside. Also, there are no options available for scheduling or for triggering the optimization once a user-defined threshold is reached.

During Internet connection optimization, the difference was too insignificant to be relevant for any user.

The Truth

Fresh RAM makes for a very good memory optimizer to be used before a RAM hog application is launched. It could give it the necessary edge. However, there is still plenty of room for improvement and adding of new features.

Read our previous review for Fresh RAM

Here are some snapshots of the application in action:




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