Cacheman - 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 !