G'day Mates, As we all know, Poser slows down and finally crashes the longer we use it. Regular saves and computer restarts work, but it would be nice if I could free up RAM without the restart. I've tried a couple of freeware RAM cleaners/defraggers but they didn't really work or I couldn't figure them out. Any suggestions on a good freeware solution would be gratefully accepteed.

OOps, forgot to mention I'm using Windows XP pro

I use mem turbo. It was the only ram defragger and cleaner out there that I could use while poser was still running without a program crash. The interface is rediculously simple. Not sure if they have a freeware version or not, but there is a demo I believe.

Attached Link: http://www.amsn.ro/

Don't know if you tried this or if it works with Poser, but minimizing and restoring an application can have the pleasant effect of dumping discontiguous memory heap for the application in Windows. I have this same problem with my plugin in C4D. I free EVERYTHING, but the memory usage does not decrease significantly. This is caused by frequent memory allocations and frees on the heap which leaves heap fragmentation. If I minimize and restore C4D, its memory usage as read in the Task Manager goes from, e.g., 150MB down to 22MB. The reason for this is that when an application is minimized in Windows, its heap (pages of memory) are paged out. During the page in process, currently unused memory is not restored (and there may be a consolidation of the heap memory pool in the process?). Good luck!

Well thanks...I think. Didn't understand a word of that. Anyway I'll try minimizing and see if it helps. Also thanks to others who responded. Am currently trying out both suggestions.

The minimize and restore trick does not work. Been there, done that many times. System mechanic is a program you can pick up at any Wal-mart for about $30. It comes with a variety of system tools as well as a tool to defrag Memory without rebooting.

~ i don't use XP, but to me a little VB-script works well, it's simple, only 1 line: FreeMem = Space (here u have to type in the number of MB) for example: (512000000) for 512 MB ~ write a line in a texteditor and than save with suffix .vbs ~ place it on desktop or whatever, just a doubleclick to activate ~ perhaps it will be helpful

I'm no expert on Windows memory allocation but it would be interesting to do a comparison. I loaded Poser with a couple of figures and some other applications running (I'm running Windows 2000 with 372MB of RAM). Physical memory used was 91%. The VBScript had no effect. Running FastDefrag reduced useage to 65%. It's not a real test or a commercial for FastDefrag but the latter seems to do a pretty good job. As I said, I'm no expert but I doubt that allocating memory for a string which is what FreeMem is doing, will be as effective as a dedicated application for that purpose.