4 NOV 2004

MemMaid 1.3 from DinarSoft

The dream of housewives and bachelors alike: someone who does all the housecleaning regularly, thoroughly and inexpensively.

I spend a fair bit of time doing housecleaning on my computers: getting rid of junk files that clutter up and waste valuable memory space.

This is even more important on PDAs.

Enter MemMaid from DinarSoft.

I used to have Remover, that esoteric but efficient and free Russian utility, on my PDAs for a few years. It’s always been hard to find where you could download that program and I don’t know what happened to it.

MemMaid is an excellent replacement with a pretty (inter)face with more skills and capabilities than you’d probably need.

Do you often install and delete software on your PDA? Or surf the Net a fair bit?

Want to run a clean and lean machine?

Let’s have a quick look at what MemMaid can do.

When you look at the screen captures you can see already what she’s capable of.

Rather than describing every option, function and possibility I’ll just highlight the important ones.

First up: MemMaid installs as expected without any problems. Version 1.3 takes only about 236kb of memory.

It opens in the Quick Cleaner mode (there is an Advanced Cleaner mode too for when you think you know what you can safely chuck out!)

Tap the Scan button and be surprised!

Particularly when you use your PDA to surf the Net MemMaid will often find a good dozen Megabytes that are the remnants of your roaming with Internet Explorer.

Together with all sorts of Windows temp files, AvantGo cache files, dead shortcuts or registry items, etc. the cleanup can be spectacular!

That’s an extra few Megabytes that you thought you didn’t have!

If that’s all MemMaid did I would be satisfied but there is more for those who love to tweak.

There are six large icons on the bottom of the screen.

We covered the first one. The second icon brings up the Notification Queue.

Now, I had to go to Help to suss out this one. Fortunately there IS a Help file and it’s a good one too.

(Just one note: being an Editor I can’t help notice these little typos like “Alos” for Also and “registerations”… There is an automatic cleanup facility in MS Word, called: Spell Checker!)

When you use alarms and reminders a lot (such as for when you connect to USB or insert a card) it can leave behind duplicate entries and other junk when certain programs are being uninstalled.

Use with caution otherwise you may miss your wake-up call tomorrow!

The third large icon covers Today Plug-Ins and Start Up Programs and Services.

I don’t know what I did but my WorldMate Pro Today Plug-In suddenly gave acte de presence again after having been absent for a few weeks! Good stuff!

The fourth icon looks familiar: it has a slider to balance the Storage and Memory allocation. You can also move the IE cache to your flash card from this screen, thus freeing up even more core memory!

The same applies to the AvantGo cache folder.

While you’re at it you may also set the cache sizes to different values here.

The fifth icon seems to duplicate File Explorer a bit but the last icon was a surprise to me.

This one calls up all the Running Processes and I was amazed at the long list (a page and a half) of stuff that was running when really not much was open except MemMaid!

Here too you can terminate any of these processes and find out if you really know what you’re doing.

If you mess up and the process cannot be killed gracefully, a quick soft reset will get you back to the previous state from where you can euthanize another process…

There are also six smaller (grey) icons at the very bottom from where you can soft reset or exit the program, for instance.

Finally, three small icons lurk in the top right corner (no tool tips here?) from where you can access the Help file and set your options.

I  haven’t touched on every capability of this program as I feel there should still be some (pleasant) surprises left in store when you download your trial copy.

DinarSoft is also planning to extend MemMaid’s functionality to flash media so that you may be able to scan, format and defrag your cards. Nifty indeed!

It would make MemMaid pretty much an all-in-one utility that Microsoft should include in their new operating system, me reckons…

What would it cost to install an extra 12 MB on your PDA?

Right.

You got the picture.

Now imagine that you had to buy extra memory every 3 months or so because your memory keeps clogging up, slowing your PDA’s performance.

When DinarSoft asks just 10 bucks for it and I reckon that’s a good price.

Remover was free, true, but MemMaid offers so much more and is a pleasure to work with.

If you’re really after a bargain you may want to check in with our friends at PocketPCThoughts who are offering a 20% discount on this beaut utility, making it a mere $7.99. Now, you have to be a subscriber to PPCThoughts but that’s free and it's an incentive to visit them more often.

Here’s the link: http://www.pocketpcthoughts.com/discounts.php

Inevitably, people will want to know what’s their upgrade policy?

My short answer is: don’t worry about it.

If the program is as good as it claims to be (and as many already have discovered) you’ll gladly pay the price for an upgrade with more features.

Generally, most developers will let you upgrade for free when the upgrade is fairly minor – including bug fixes (that’s seems only fair to me, anyway).

Often there is also a period of recency of purchase which qualifies you for a free upgrade.

I frankly don’t know what DinarSoft’s policy is but they look like they want to do the right thing for our PPC community.

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