Frequently Asked Questions
Is Cacheman Freeware or Shareware?
How to get support?
Does Cacheman work on Windows NT4/2000/XP?
What are GDI / User resources?
Can I increase GDI / User resources?
Does Cacheman change the Virtual Memory size?
Does Cacheman have to be running all the time to work?
Does Cacheman add drivers to my system?
Will Cacheman improve every computer?
Is it dangerous to use Cacheman?
How can I restore my original (pre-Cacheman) settings?
I'm using Windows 95 and Cacheman's Tray Icon has an empty image - how to solve it!?
What is page file allocation?
Is Cacheman Freeware or Shareware?
That depends on yourself - please read this section.
How to get support?
Please refer to this section.
Does Cacheman work on Windows NT4/2000/XP?
Yes, most settings are designed for Windows 9x-ME, but Cacheman offers even some NT4/2000/XP only settings.
What are GDI / User resources?
System resources are areas of memory that are used by the input manager (USER) and the graphic display interface manager (GDI) for keeping track of all of the windows that are open in a session and for drawing objects on the screen.
The Graphics Device Interface (GDI) is the graphical system that manages what appears on the screen. It also provides graphics support for printers and other output devices. It draws graphic primitives, manipulates bitmaps, and interacts with device-independent graphics drivers, including those for display and printer output device drivers.
The User component manages input from the keyboard, mouse, and other input devices and output to the user interface (windows, icons, menus, and so on). It also manages interaction with the sound driver, timer, and communications ports. Windows 98/ME uses an asynchronous input model for all input to the system and applications. As the various input devices generate interrupts, the interrupt handler converts these interrupts to messages and sends the messages to a raw input thread area, which in turn passes each message to the appropriate message queue. Although each Win32-based thread can have its own message queue, all Win16-based applications share a common one.
The size of each heap is fixed.
16-bit User heap (64K)
32-bit User window heap (2MB)
32-bit User menu heap (2MB)
16-bit GDI heap (64K)
32-bit GDI heap (2MB)
If any of these segments becomes full, programs may fail to load and Windows 9x/ME may become unstable - regardless of how much other free memory there is.
Can I increase GDI / User resources?
This is not possible. If you have very serious GDI / User resource problems the only way to solve them is to use less applications at the same time or to upgrade to Windows 2000/XP.
Does Cacheman change the Virtual Memory size?
No.
Does Cacheman have to be running all the time to work?
No. If you don't use Cacheman's Memory Recovery, History Graph or Logging functions it's enough to launch it only if you want to tweak some settings. A reboot is needed to make most settings effective, Cacheman will ask you to reboot if you quit it.
Does Cacheman add drivers my system?
No.
Will Cacheman improve every computer?
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. Of course, we have received a few reports where Cacheman was not able to help. We urge you to try it yourself and decide.
You can see in the User comments topic how Cacheman has improved performance on many systems.
Is it dangerous to use Cacheman?
Cacheman works on a huge numbers of computers without any problems. We have received a few user reports who have had problems while using Cacheman with exotic device drivers. (e.g. some noname network adapters). Use Cacheman at your own risk as stated in the license agreement of the installation program! Cacheman saves your original system settings on first startup, you can restore them anytime!
How can I restore my original (pre-Cacheman) settings?
Please refer to this section.
I'm using Windows 95 and Cacheman's Tray Icon has an empty image - how to solve it!?
Please download the ComCtl32 Update from http://www.outertech.com
What is paging file allocation?
On Windows NT4/2000/XP Cacheman displays not only paging file usage, but also paging file allocation. This value represents the size of reserved paging file space for potential usage.