Tweaks For Windows

Several users have complaints that their Windows has either slowed down, or inexplicably, keeps locking-up with incomprehensible "kernel32" errors. We have made several forays to find a solution.

Most Windows users may not be aware that extended use of the operating system causes your available memory resources to decrease. This is despite not even having run any programs. In our search across the Net, we have come across some cool tools. Let's take look at each one in turn.

The first two are not exactly hidden; they're available as part of the standard Windows 98 install. The two are Resource Meter and System Monitor; both true Windows programs. They also consume the resources they monitor. Resource Meter is a 3-bar applet that roosts in the tool tray and monitors system, user and GDI resources. The tool tray icon indicates the state of Win with green (good), yellow (warn) and red (you're dead) bars. All the documentation we've found states that green is good, but when the resource bars go yellow, you are moments away from a lock-up.

System Monitor is for those who like lots of flashing lights and reports. Norton System Utilities has a similar bar that really consumes resources but keeps the idle engaged. SysMon is Windows equivalent and goes way beyond Resource Meter. It can monitor the state of the Dial-Up adapter, disk cache, file system, Kernel and the memory manager. There are several sub-areas for each. Theoretically you can monitor everything. But, as the app itself warns, all threat monitoring sure consumes resources.

Microsoft's Knowledge Base has brave words (actually excuses) about this poor resource management. It squarely puts the blame on poorly written applications. It also advises you not to use them! Great idea. But why are they encouraging Windows users not to use Windows?

To really stress-test the OS, you need to have it running for an extended period. In our test, we left our PC on for 2 whole days (48 hours). To monitor happenings, we used the included Resource Meter. This perhaps was not a perfect (laboratory) test, but we made some significant findings. We began with about 80% of physical memory free. This degraded to under 45%, 12 hours later. The system never did run for 2 days; it locked up after about 36 hours.

IE and Outlook Express are known resource hogs. CPU utilisations goes to 100% when they load. Evidently there were memory-leaks. Windows memory leaks are legend among expert users. When the OS fires up, it and the various applications and drivers it loads, all leech away at available memory. The "leak" causes applications that have recently terminated to continue to cling on to resources without releasing it back into the general pool.

Because of this tight-fistedness, the available system's resources keep falling until they hit rock bottom. The most common (and expert recommended way) to recover is to restart your PC and Windows. This is extreme and requires interrupting work or tasks. Or you can use third-party utilities that claim to be memory managers like MemTurbo and MaxMem. We've used both and neither really resolves the problem. On memory manager, RAMIdle, seemed to be the primary resource hog.

We can rationalise hypothetically why the system resource memory deteriorated, even when it was not in use. But the most common reasons of memory leak include:

1. Badly written screen savers use resources but when terminated or stopped fail to release them

2. Whenever your antivirus software runs a background check, it causes a drop of up to 25% in available resources. This memory chunk is not released back to Windows after the scan completes

3. Java applets cause significant memory and resource consumption; regardless of the browser used. This was especially apparent at sites which load large Java classes.

The most obvious solution was to increase RAM. We tried that and increased the RAM on our Windows 98SE test bed from 64 to 128 MB. The memory leaks remained, except we now had about 33% more usable time before the system choked.

A nifty freeware, TClockEx (189kB, Win 9x/NT/2K/ME, free, download from: http://users.iafrica.com/d/da/dalen/files/tclockex.zip) is a System Tray clock replacement including access to a calendar. Plus reports on system resource use, including CPU utilisation. We recommend that you too download a copy and closely monitor Windows resources to avoid those "deaths." TClockEx means you just need a single applet instead of 3: Clock, System Monitor, and Resource Meter.

There is of course end-game: an instant cure to the Win 9x Blues. Upgrade to Windows 2000 Pro SP1 to resolve most of your the memory handling errors. The only downside is this 32-bit OS needs at least a Pentium II with 128 MB or more RAM and at least 1 GB free space.

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