Forums Help & support Can't uninstall axcrypt? Reply To: Can't uninstall axcrypt?

#5567 Reply

Svante
Spectator

Hi Tomzzz,

There’s some confusion here… There’s no difference in behavior between 2.1.1481 and 2.1.1489. Both versions are published as installer packages, and portable stand-alone softwares. Both use the “sign in” metaphor to retain and cache the password used for encryption and decryption. Both will stay in memory until exited. I’m guessing you have the 1481 standalone, and the 1489 installer. The uninstaller uninstalls cleanly as far as we know.

The older, non-maintained, version 1.7.x also stays in memory, and is actually harder to “exit”.

A common misconception is that it’s a problem having programs loaded in memory. Generally speaking, it’s not. Windows will also unload stuff that’s not needed. AxCrypt typically uses about 30M of ‘private’ memory, i.e. non-shared memory that contains real information that cannot be recovered from the image or the system and thus must either remain in memory or be written and saved to the page file if it must be ejected from memory.

In an 8GB system, that’s not even half of a percent of physical memory.

AxCrypt needs to stay in memory to work at all, at least during the period from when a file is opened to when it’s closed. If the ‘Secured Folders’ feature is used, which facilitates to keep folders encrypted, it also needs to stay in memory in order to monitor what’s happening.

Finally, memory is there to be used! There’s absolutely no reason to have a lot of free memory. Y0ur system won’t be faster because you have free memory. Most likely it’ll be slower. A ‘perfect’ memory management system will under load keep your memory utilization to 100%.

On the contrary, in Windows (and Linux) starting a new process – now that’s a performance killer! It’s a very ‘heavy’ operation, and should be avoided if possible. In essence, to a limit, staying in memory makes your system faster, not slower.