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 512MB 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!
Does Windows 98/ME still have the Disk Cache problems?
Windows has changed its Disk Cache strategy with the introduction of Windows 98. Applications can be executed directly in the Disk Cache instead of loading them into another memory area and launching them there (as Windows 95 does). Although this is a great improvement, there is still no limit on how large the cache can be. You will probably find reports that the Disk Cache problem is fixed in Win 98/ME because a too large Disk Cache is not wasted space anymore. We surmise that this is NOT the case evident from thousands of user reports. The Disk Cache can still rise to such an amount that virtual memory swapping does not remain an occasional but becomes a permanent activity even on systems with large memory amount and disabled PageFile Call Async Manager. Limiting the Disk Cache size has reduced the swapping in many cases.
Will Cacheman improve every system?
No. Cacheman is not a magic utility. Many Cacheman users have achieved great performance and/or system reaction time improvement, some even reported their system behaves after using Cacheman like after an expensive hardware upgrade. You can read some user comments in this section of the help file. Of course, we have received a few reports where Cacheman was not able to help. We urge you to try it yourself and decide.
Is it dangerous to use Cacheman?
Cacheman works on a numerous systems without any problems. We have received a few user reports who have had problems while using Cacheman with exotic device drivers. (mostly network adapters). Use Cacheman at your own risk as stated in the license agreement of the installation program!
If you encounter any problems - read this section how to get rid of Cacheman.
Can I get support from Outer Technologies? Maybe special settings for my system?
In the last few months Cacheman related mails have reached an overwhelming amount. Many people wrote not only about Cacheman or Performance tips, but also about their general computer problems. We have always tried to do our best and have solved many problems. However because of Cacheman's Freeware nature we are simply not able to answer every mail anymore. If we do so, we would have to stop developing new software, including future Cacheman versions. You can of course still write to cacheman-support@outertech.com, we will try our best, however there is no guarantee that you will get an answer.
We have created a Cacheman support mail account for customers of our Shareware products. If you are a registered user of Linkman or StartEd you can write to cacheman-registered@outertech.com, and you should get an answer within 24 hours.