Memory low problem --- are all RAM cleaners really 'snake oil'?

For a couple of weeks I have been getting 'memory low -- close programs to avoid information loss' warnings. Sometimes I just carry on with no problem, but I also get the machine freezing or crashing. I have a couple of apps which 'seem' to clean / reduce memory usage but usually without solving the issue, plus the usage % reported by one of these is often lower by more than 10% compared to what is reported by SysGauge ( an excellent new program).

An article I read claims all RAM cleaning tools are 'snake oil' as is often said of registry cleaners. Is this so? Would it be a waste of time trying out some, as I was planning to do?

My 2-in-1 tablet machine is a 'small memory / storage device' with only 4 GB (nominal) RAM, adding more RAM is not an option. But for 8 months it has run quite adequately for my purposes, smooth and quick (though there are a number of glitches at present). The warning comes when I am only running 1 or 2 programs, plus some Gadgets which I do know can be resource hungry but can be closed when necessary. Often it happens with a browser in use, usually Edge or Opera (again, I know that Chrome is a hog).

So, I am looking for advice on (a) using RAM cleaners (b) other system tweaks to reduce memory usage.

I don't use RAM cleaners except for the Memory Restart add-in for Firefox, handy when downloading videos from You Tube to know when things start to slow down. Otherwise the best RAM cleaner relies on the fact that RAM storage of data is volatile, only works while the computer is on. Shutting down or rebooting/restarting turns off the power to the RAM and wipes out what data was in RAM giving things a clean start.

All RAM cleaners, optimizers, boosters, etc, are snake oil. Some are worse than others but none are truly useful. Their only very dubious benefit is to make the numbers in Task Manager more attractive to those who do not understand what they mean. Windows memory management is very complex and efficient and will not benefit from third party add-ons.

In any event such a program could not help with your problem. Some would make the problem worse, even if only temporarily. Low memory warnings do not refer to low RAM but to a shortage of commit charge. This happens when the commit charge approaches the commit limit. Unless you have a memory leak, impossible to tell from the provided information, there are only 3 solutions.

1. Run less.
2. Upgrade RAM.
3. Make the pagefile larger.

Is your hard drive full? It could be a pagefile issue.

Edit . Just seen you have plenty of hard drive space :/

Archie123 said:

Is your hard drive full? It could be a pagefile issue.
Edit . Just seen you have plenty of hard drive space :/

I don't think @clayto has actually said how much free space they have, but it could still be a pagefile issue if it is set for a fixed size, rather than letting the system manage it.

Thanks all ---- some things to work on. The free storage on my C drive is at this precise moment 17.660 GB out of a 46 GB
total (on Windows partitions ---I also have Android partitions), so I think I am right in saying that it is not likely to be the cause of my memory issue. Although I have been trying to get it back up to 20 GB in preparation for Creators, I doubt that I will succeed now as I have done a great deal of junk cleaning already with effective cleaners, installing / moving all I can to D, the SD card, to external drives, Clouds. I became a 'master slimmer,' with my last 2-in-1 tablet to make upgrading to 10 possible, and the feature updates --- it only had 32 GB storage and 2 GB RAM (a lot of the specs of my current Cube are double(ish) what I had before).

I will check out CleanMem, the page file, etc

Cleanmem will not and cannot solve your problem. The problem has nothing to do with RAM usage. The problem is the commit charge approaching the commit limit.