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Cacheman
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Version
4.1
Cacheman is a utility which tweaks the Disk Cache
settings of Windows 95/98/ME and prevents frequent
swapping of the data to hard drive resulting in an
improved performance, system reaction time and even
stability. Besides this Cacheman corrects also generic
problems on systems with more than 512MB of RAM.
What is Disk Cache?
Disk Cache is a part of RAM that acts as an
intermediate buffer when data is read from and written
to file systems on secondary storage devices.
The Disk Cache driver stores the most recently
accessed data in RAM. When a program needs to access
new data, the operating system first checks to see if
the data is in the cache before reading it from the
disk. Because computers can access data from RAM much
faster than from a storage device, disk caching can
significantly increase performance.
What's the problem with the Windows Disk Cache?
There is no problem with the Disk Cache itself, but
Windows can often gobble up 60% (in few cases even
80%) of your installed memory for the Cache. It does
not hurt if you still have enough free RAM, but should
this be not the case - Windows will very probably
increase the usage of Virtual Memory (Swap File on
your Hard Drive) instead of decreasing the Disk Cache
by a significant amount. Using Virtual Memory is
extremely slow compared to RAM access. In this
situation the advantages of a large Disk Cache are
simply gone and your system will considerably slow
down.
This is not the only Disk Cache problem. There is a
good chance that Windows 9x/ME will not be able to
work correctly on a system with more than 512 MB of
memory. The cause is a too large Cache that consumes
all of the addresses in the system arena, leaving no
virtual memory addresses available for other functions
such as creating a new virtual machine. Cacheman cures
this problem as well !
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