Optimizing RAM is the most important parameters for having a fast OS and system. MKN MemoryMonitor is a freeware application which monitors and optimizes the system’s memory usage and performance. MemoryMonitor shows detailed information about the physical and paged memory, paging and page faults, and other data. It also displays the amount of memory used by the system kernel and cache.
Although you can check and monitor memory usage with task manager, it cannot be used for optimizing. The application comes with a good and simple interface that displays all the details on the performance of the memory. It shows both physical and paged memory performance. The graph can be displayed with a refresh rate between 3 seconds (very low) and 0.1 seconds (very high).
When you need to optimize RAM, click on the tools menu and select Optimize Memory option and soon memory would be released. There is also automatic optimize settings, where you can specify the memory limit, beyond which the memory will be automatically optimized.
MemoryMonitor also runs in the background and optimizes the memory, enforcing more aggressive paging in low memory situations. It can be minimized to system tray and most importantly it does not hog system memory. Memory Monitor is a freeware definitely worth trying on Windows XP as it does the job very well.
I used FreeRamXP for this purpose, it is also pretty good and does it job without issues.