FREE UP SYSTEM MEMORY
Reclaim memory from background processes
Windows is supposed to manage memory usage on your PC automatically, by switching to virtual memory when you run out of physical RAM, and by freeing up memory from inactive programs. But if you open Task Manager (by pressing Ctrl+shift+esc) and look at the Memory column, you’ll see there are plenty of processes currently using RAM in the background. Some of these are likely to be tools you recently closed, never opened or don’t even recognise, but which are cumulatively consuming a significant amount of available memory.
Rather than let your PC slip into slower virtual memory, you can reclaim RAM using Wise Memory Optimizer (www. snipca.com/43238). This free program displays a pie chart showing you how much memory is in use and how much is available. Click its Optimize button ( 1 in our screenshot above right) – or right-click its taskbar icon and choose Optimize – to free up as much RAM as possible from background processes.
You can also optimise memory automatically by clicking the Settings cog and ticking Auto Optimization 2 . Decide whether to release RAM when available memory falls below a certain threshold or to do so at regular intervals, and set the tool to run when Windows starts to prevent freezes and crashes.
Wise Memory Optimizer reduced our PC’S memory usage from 95 per cent to 48 per cent 3 , though this gradually crept back up to 66 per cent. We confirmed these figures by checking Task Manager.
Increase your PC’S memory with a USB stick
If your PC often struggles with resourceheavy activities such as gaming and video editing, you can increase its memory (temporarily) using a Windows feature called Readyboost and a spare USB stick or SD card. Your system treats the removable storage as extra RAM, so it can perform intensive tasks more efficiently, though only if your main system drive is a traditional hard drive. Readyboost won’t work with SSDS, which are fast enough to provide speedy virtual memory, but it can help improve the performance of older PCS (you can also use it in new computers running Windows 11).
To use Readyboost, insert a USB stick or SD card in the relevant port or slot, then open This PC in File Explorer and right-click the card or stick’s icon. Select ‘Format’, choose ‘NTFS’ in the ‘File system’ dropdown menu and click Start. Once formatting is complete, right-click the drive icon again, choose Properties and click the Readyboost tab. Select the option ‘Dedicate this device to Readyboost’ (see screenshot below left), specify how much space to allocate to the feature and click OK.
Readyboost relies on your USB stick or SD card remaining plugged in – as soon as you disconnect it, you’ll lose the memory boost.
Adjust your PC’S virtual memory
As mentioned above, when insufficient RAM is available, Windows temporarily saves data to an area of your hard drive called virtual memory – also known as the ‘paging file’. But if your PC runs out of both real and virtual memory, it will crash – which is something you obviously want to avoid. The paging file is also important for creating ‘memory dumps’ that tell you what caused the crash (see Issue 640, page 35 for more on this).
Windows should warn you when you’re low on virtual memory, and adjust the paging file accordingly, but if you often run out of RAM it’s worth increasing its size manually to prevent errors and crashes.
In Windows 10 or 11, press Windows key+i to open Settings. Choose ‘System’ then About and click ‘Advanced system settings’. Click the Advanced tab, then the Settings button under Performance and click the Advanced tab there. Click ‘Change’ under ‘Virtual memory’ and untick ‘Automatically manage paging file size for all drives’.
Select ‘Custom size’ (see screenshot above) to increase the paging-file size for your main hard drive (usually your C: drive). Enter the ‘Initial size’ (the same amount that Windows has currently allocated) and a ‘Maximum size’ – this can be up to three times your amount of physical RAM, but double should be enough. Click ‘Set’ then OK to confirm. If you have any problems, re-enable the ‘Automatically manage’ option.
Reduce your browser’s memory usage
Your web browser is almost certainly the biggest memory hog on your PC and, because you can’t do without it, often the
main reason for upgrading your RAM. This is particularly true of Chrome, which uses a separate background process for every tab, plug-in and extension. Windows’ Task Manager doesn’t tell you which Chrome process relates to which element, so you can’t simply close the one that’s using the most memory, though you can get this information from the browser’s own Task Manager – select ‘More tools’ in Chrome’s main menu to access this.
In Microsoft Edge, you can reduce memory usage through a handy feature called Sleeping Tabs, which releases RAM from inactive tabs so it can be used by other processes. To activate it, click the browser’s three-dot menu button and choose Settings then ‘System and performance’. In the ‘Optimise performance’ section, switch on ‘Save resources with sleeping tabs’ (see screenshot above right), then click the dropdown menu next to ‘Put inactive tabs to sleep after the specified amount of time’ and choose a waiting time, from 30 seconds of inactivity to 12 hours. Clicking a sleeping tab will wake it up again. Microsoft claims Sleeping Tabs reduces Edge’s memory usage by an average of 32 per cent.
Firefox has a less sophisticated feature called Tab Unloading, which automatically puts tabs to sleep when system memory is slow to prevent the browser from crashing. You can manually unload your least recently used tabs by typing about:unloads, pressing Enter and clicking the Unload button. It’s also worth typing about:memory and clicking the ‘Minimize memory usage’ button to free up RAM from Firefox.
Chrome has yet to introduce a proper memory-saving feature, though you can unload and reload tabs by going to chrome://discards. A better option is to install the Tab Suspender extension (www.snipca.com/43247), which automatically releases RAM from unused tabs after a specific period of inactivity – or manually when you click ‘Suspend: Tab’ (see screenshot above) – and lets you restore them with a single click. We use this tool on our own PC to reduce memory usage and prevent Chrome from freezing when we have multiple tabs open.