Vista Memory Issues: How to clear the memory without a 3rd party application

Thursday, March 13, 2008

HowTo XML

I believe it was Joe Levi who was running into vista vs. Visual Studio 2005 memory issues while compiling our latest build of www.lifetime.com . We both run Vista as our development environment (We watched all the sessions at mix07 and vista looked like it worked fine with Visual Studio 2005 + 2 hours of patches). We did some MSDN surfing and found a way to clear the memory within Windows Vista ( basically it kills all idle running applications).

Here is how:

Create a shortcut:

Add Location of Shortcut:

"%windir%\system32\rundll32.exe advapi32.dll,ProcessIdleTasks"

Click Next, Change the name of your shortcut:

To:

Then Finish.

Extra Credit:

Set up a the windows task manager to run this task every oh half hour or so.

Feel free to use the XML provide to update your task. Courtesy of Joe Levi:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-16"?>
<Task version="1.2" xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/windows/2004/02/mit/task">
<RegistrationInfo>
    <Date>2008-02-26T10:20:16.4557818</Date>
    <Author>*Add Your Info Here*</</Author>
    <Description>%windir%\system32\rundll32.exe advapi32.dll,ProcessIdleTasks</Description>
</RegistrationInfo>
<Triggers>
    <TimeTrigger id="502f2271-c7c8-428a-9ac6-47359a741e19">
      <Repetition>
        <Interval>PT30M</Interval>
        <StopAtDurationEnd>false</StopAtDurationEnd>
      </Repetition>
      <StartBoundary>2008-02-26T07:00:00</StartBoundary>
      <ExecutionTimeLimit>PT30M</ExecutionTimeLimit>
      <Enabled>true</Enabled>
    </TimeTrigger>
</Triggers>
<Principals>
    <Principal id="Author">
      <UserId>*Add Your Info Here*</UserId>
      <LogonType>InteractiveToken</LogonType>
      <RunLevel>HighestAvailable</RunLevel>
    </Principal>
</Principals>
<Settings>
    <IdleSettings>
      <Duration>PT10M</Duration>
      <WaitTimeout>PT1H</WaitTimeout>
      <StopOnIdleEnd>true</StopOnIdleEnd>
      <RestartOnIdle>false</RestartOnIdle>
    </IdleSettings>
    <MultipleInstancesPolicy>IgnoreNew</MultipleInstancesPolicy>
    <DisallowStartIfOnBatteries>false</DisallowStartIfOnBatteries>
    <StopIfGoingOnBatteries>true</StopIfGoingOnBatteries>
    <AllowHardTerminate>true</AllowHardTerminate>
    <StartWhenAvailable>true</StartWhenAvailable>
    <RunOnlyIfNetworkAvailable>false</RunOnlyIfNetworkAvailable>
    <AllowStartOnDemand>true</AllowStartOnDemand>
    <Enabled>true</Enabled>
    <Hidden>false</Hidden>
    <RunOnlyIfIdle>false</RunOnlyIfIdle>
    <WakeToRun>false</WakeToRun>
    <ExecutionTimeLimit>PT0S</ExecutionTimeLimit>
    <Priority>7</Priority>
    <RestartOnFailure>
      <Interval>PT5M</Interval>
      <Count>3</Count>
    </RestartOnFailure>
</Settings>
<Actions Context="Author">
    <Exec>
      <Command>%windir%\system32\rundll32.exe</Command>
      <Arguments>advapi32.dll,ProcessIdleTasks</Arguments>
    </Exec>
</Actions>
</Task>