WinMemory Cleaner can clean by itself - every few hours, or whenever free memory drops below a percentage you set. It sounds like maintenance. On a healthy PC it is a small machine for making your apps reload from disk all day long.
Auto-optimization is the feature most people switch on first and understand last. Both of the tool's triggers - every X hours and when free memory is below X percent - are real, documented options. The second one hides a trap that follows directly from how Windows memory works, and it is worth understanding before you let any cleaner run unsupervised.
The interval trigger is simple: every set number of hours, the clean runs. The threshold trigger watches the free-memory percentage and cleans when it falls below your line - the tool's own example logic, meant for PCs that slowly fill up. Used with the exclusion list, it can also run quietly from the tray or at startup. Nothing here is dishonest engineering. The problem is what the trigger is measuring.
Free memory is the one number that is supposed to be near zero. Windows converts idle RAM into standby cache on purpose, so on a well-used PC the free percentage sits in single digits for most of the day - while gigabytes of standby stand ready to be handed over instantly. A trigger watching Free sees a permanent emergency that does not exist, and fires again and again. Each firing dumps the cache your apps were about to reuse.
Some machines genuinely qualify - a shared low-RAM PC with a known leaking app that cannot be replaced yet. Then: exclude every important app, clean standby and modified areas only (never working sets), choose a generous interval rather than a hair-trigger percentage, and review monthly whether the underlying problem can finally be fixed. That is a compromise with a named reason - not a default for every PC.
Leave auto-optimization off. Keep the tool for the moments it is actually for: you have spotted a leak and need breathing room, or an old low-RAM machine is about to open something heavy. A clean you decide on, after looking at Task Manager for ten seconds, beats a hundred cleans a timer decided on while looking at the wrong number.
The complete knowledge and full walkthrough are in the video - the tool on a real PC, every option shown live.
Watch Full VideoThe option works exactly as built - the problem is the metric. Windows keeps free memory low by design because standby cache uses the space productively. A trigger based on free memory therefore fires on healthy PCs all day.
It fires less chaotically, but it still cannot know what you are doing when it lands, and it still dumps useful cache. If you must automate, combine a long interval with the exclusion list and standby-only cleaning.
First find out why - that pattern usually means a leaking app, and the cure is restarting or updating that app. Automation is a last resort for a machine whose problem cannot be fixed, not a treatment for an undiagnosed one.