Norton Utilities Premium - What does RAM Reclaimer actually do?

Norton Security | Norton Internet Security
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So I bowed to the constant prompts to install Norton Utilities Premium and saw that it thought I should run the RAM Reclaimer. 

My system has 16GB RAM with 8GB free. 

Does anyone actually know what this does precisely? Does it just flush everything out to the page file, giving the illusion that it's "freed" up my RAM? It says it will free up my RAM so my system runs faster. If that's all it does, Windows will then need to fetch those blocks from slower Page file when it needs them, thus slowing down my computer.

Active RAM went from 8.7GB to 4GB after running it, Standby (cached files) went from 7.2GB to 4.9GB (thus loosing files cached in RAM, now they need to be obtained from disk). Free RAM went from 89MB to 6.5GB. So in effect 6.5GB of cached files/data was removed from RAM. If/when I need to access them, they need to be re-obtained from slower disk instead of already being in RAM... thus slowing down my computer, not speeding it up.

Am I missing something?

2

My own assumption is that it closes programs that have been idle for some time but I could be all wet here.

If you need to access those files then it would require for them to be read from disk and loaded again into memory. If you have plenty of memory then this utility is not helping and yes it may be causing more time when you do need the programs. For those with a small amount of memory it is doing a service. Today I think 12GB of memory up to 16GB is the best for home users.