Tuesday, December 18th, 2007
Author: Jon B
Clear Your PC Memory The Easy Way!
If you’re a designer using a pc platform then you know that most of the image editing software you use eats up your computer’s resources. (Stop laughing MAC users) Especially if you have about 6 to 8 different applications running at the same time, depending on your computer’s specs, running all these applications at the same time will often cause the pc to lock up or shut down on its own.
So what do you do when you start to notice that your pc is bogging down? Wouldn’t it be nice if there was a simple button you can click on to clear out your computer’s memory? WinXP doesn’t have that button but that shouldn’t stop us from making our very own clear memory button. This is really simple so let’s get to it…
First thing you need to do is right-click anywhere on your desktop, click on New, click on Shortcut. This will bring up the Create Shortcut wizard, copy and paste the following into the location text box:
%windir%\system32\rundll32.exe advapi32.dll,ProcessIdleTasks
Click Next – Now name it whatever you want, I suggest naming in “Clear Memory” and click Finish.
And that’s it, you should see an icon called Clear Memory on your desktop. Whenever your computer hangs when you’re using your apps simply click this button and your computer memory will be cleared w/o having to restart completely…pretty nifty huh?
[poll=3]
doesnt work in windows 7..and i cant find anything that does
Really useful material. When I see the screen shots, I have faith.
Could be good. I have delayed so long because of not being sure how to do this that it will take all night, but here goes.
Nice tip. Really useful. thanks
I just see that someone said it doesn’t work on windows 7. Keep the windows 7 anyway. I “upgraded” to windows 8 and had compatibility problems with many installed programs, Camtasia as an example.
That is really good. I have struggled to get where you got. Thanks.
Did not work on Windows Vista.
Really it was very informative post on the memory clearing.MY computer was very slow and some time it freezes too but your tips has given has helped me a lot.
I totally agree with you . Dust are the main reason for the damage of the computer fan. And also it make the computer look dirty from the inside.I always had a problem in cleaning the dust.
I find many web pages suggesting this as a method of clearing a memory. Though not sure whether it really clears the memory or not.So I pushed my computer off the desk.
Windows XP has many tricks like this. Virtually you can make shortcut for any procedure you want to follow. This can be beneficiary while dealing with applications that eat up huge memory.
Nathan Replied:
April 12th, 2010 at 1:19 am
Is the shortcut the same for Windows 2000 Professional? I still use it and like it a lot, and can see the benefit of being able to do this.
XP has a number of processes that normally run during idle time every 3 days. This command runs them now. It does not clear memory. Looking at Task Manager while it is running will quickly show this. In any event clearing memory is a bad idea. Free memory is wasted memory and the enemy of performance.
Larry Miller
Microsoft MCSA
Thanks. Great tip.
Is there a similar thing for Windows 2000?
mY COMPUTER HAS COMPLETELY CRASHED, SO I CANT EVEN GET TO THE DESKTOP, NOR SAFE MODE. I ONLY GET THE BLUE BACKGROUND WITH ALL THOSE SILLY WHITE WRITINGS. MYCOMPUTER WAS INFECTED WITH VIRUSES AND NOW I CANT EVEN REMOVE THEM SO HOW CAN I CLEAR MY COMPUTER AND REPLACE THE OS
Napoleon Replied:
July 21st, 2010 at 9:43 am
Darling, if your computer has “completely crashed”, how ever did you get here? Also, KEEP SHOUTING! (200 years and death changes nothing…)
This is a great tip… I need to do a reinstall soon but this will buy me a couple more months of time
If your pc is frozen, how are you going to click on a desktop shortcut when you can’t even move the cursor or minimize to get to the desktop?
Jon B Replied:
August 25th, 2008 at 10:10 pm
If your pc is completely frozen and won’t do anything it’s probably not a system memory issue.
I would boot up in safe mode, and start cleaning out my pc by uninstalling programs I no longer use.
I would also run a spyware program.
Lol, I had never thought of that. Nice tutorial.
Thank you: GREAT
This was a rather helpful tip, can you post more on troubleshooting WinXP??? Thank you.
wow! thank you for the tip, it helped me restoring my pc without formating it