Memory Loss? Not always a problem

Have you ever wondered why after spending some time working on your computer, that the more programs you open and close, the less available resources you have? You'd think that closing a program would free up any resources it takes up when running right? Wrong.

Windows has a DLL caching mechanism that keeps certain Dynamic Link Libraries (DLL files) loaded to help shorten the time it takes to open programs you use often. While this is a good idea in itself, it is only really useful when you use the same programs over and over and open and close them frequently.

This tip I've found quite some time ago turns off the DLL Caching "feature" and allows the unloading of all program-related DLL files upon closing the program that loaded them. This can and does in fact free up resources used and can also help gain overall stability of the system, especially if the computer is going to be run for long periods of time without restarting.

I've found two variants of this tip, one of which is labeled for Win9x family of the Windows platform (which includes Windows 95/98/98SE/ME), while the other was aimed at Windows XP. Although the Win9x tweak was tested on a XP system and verified to have the same result. So I'll give both here.

Win9x unload DLLs:

Go to Start - Run - type in "REGEDIT" without quotes and press enter. The Registry Editor opens up. Now use the lefthand explorer pane to find this key:
"HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer" In the Righthand pane, right click in an empty space and choose "New... - String Value" and name it: "AlwaysUnloadDll" (without quotes and capital letters are important). Give this new string a value of 1, close the Registry Editor, and reboot Windows.

WinXP Unload DLLs: Go to Start - Run - type in "REGEDIT" without quotes and press enter. The Registry Editor opens up. Now use the lefthand explorer pane to find this key: "HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer" Still in the lefthand pane, right click on the Explorer folder and choose "New - KEY". Give it a name of "AlwaysUnloadDLL" (without quotes and capital letters are important). Inside that key change the default string to 1 and close regedit and reboot.

This tweak is perfect for low resource systems. The drawback of using this is a very small slowdown in the initial opening of programs, but this isn't half as bad as it sounds. And the benefit of using this tweak far outweighs the drawback.


Hope this tweak helps all of you.
Regards,
Galadriel - TomCoyote Forums