So, you've got Windows 7, you've got 4GB or 8GB of RAM, you're playing a game and suddenly you go to the desktop with the message that "Windows has detected your computer's performance is slow"
And no matter how many times you click "leave my damn theme alone and get out of my face!" the message will always return.
You check task manager and despite it telling you that there's at least 1GB of free memory available, it does not tell you the whole story. What you will want to do is open resource monitor and go to the memory tab.
If your experience is anything like mine, you'll see that "free memory" is at 0MB and "standby memory" is all your memory that should be free. This standby memory is supposed to be released as required by other programs, but that doesn't always happen. Programs and sometimes games especially can haemorrage RAM like no tomorrow.
People have suggest all sorts of things but the only thing I've found that will clear this standby memory is a nifty program called RAMMap. The problem is:
It won't auto-clear this memory as far as I know. I would like to either set it to clear once it hits a certain amount or clear it after a set amount of time.
and
I want windows 7 to completely stop caching crap into memory. 8GB of standby memory for things like zip files and word docs that I will never open again is absurd. I want the "slow performance" messages to go away and never bother me again, and if need be I want to let games and programs leak as much RAM as they need. I have 16GB so I don't care if something legit uses it, but windows won't release standby memory if a program is leaking memory.
How can you completely disable windows from caching crap into standby memory?
Pagefile? Of course. And superfetch, and prefetch. Yet windows 7 still caches previously opened *anything* into memory, including the 2-4GB that ARMA2 generally occupied once I close it.
Essentially, the "standby" memory keeps growing and growing as you use the PC. Eventually it will fill all your unused RAM. If a program starts leaking I guess windows won't release more standby memory. It has happened a lot before with 4GB and 8GB but not really with 16GB. Either case I want to stop windows from keeping things I've closed in memory. Sometimes it's sitting there with 6GB doing nothing useful, on the off chance I might open it again.
I have never had an issue with Windows 7 caching things and later on random programs crashing. I don't really see a point to disabling it since that RAM is actually unused and if a program needs it Windows will automatically free up that cached memory so the new program can use it. What software are you running that has a massive memory leak? No matter what you do that program is going to keep using up RAM even if caching is disabled.
Post a screenshot from "Use Counts" page in RamMap.
A lot of standby pages is good. Ideally there shouldn't be any free pages and some reserve of zeroed pages (a few MB) for immediate allocations. Standby pages cannot be disabled - it is an essential feature of Windows memory manager. Standby memory is not the reason of your problems.