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I'm rendering some very large images, and need all the memory I can get (sound familiar?)... I was in the Task Manager killing running processes when it occured to me; "explorer" is just another program running. During a render, it really serves no purpose to have it running. So I killed it. On my system, this gave up 30 Meg! As I write this, it's using 22 Meg.

What I do is open the Task Manager, and kill all non-essential processes. When I'm ready, I kill explorer as well. I leave the Task Manager open for two reasons; I can monitor performance, and when I'm ready to use explorer, I go to "Applications> New Task..." and start explorer again. If you do this, don't be freaked out when you see your icon bar and everything disappear; they'll be back when you start running it again...

Hi mtripoli,

Yes I do this as well, but just to note that task manager will use about 1-2% of your processor time. You can close it as well and just ctrl-alt-del to bring it back when you need explorer...

Kandor

You're right... good point (and another 5 meg!)...

Actually, that might be dangerous.

The explorer you see in Task manager is not the internet explorer (well kind of) ... it is the whole "Windows" explorer. A core OS function. If you kill that, then you are living on the edge

(once I thought the same that explorer meant Iexplore ... but the MS support freaked out when they heard what I was trying to do )

@Thomas, you are absolutely right about what explorer is, but I think that killing the shell can't be that dangerous... there's a whole ms-dos environment running slowly and loudly under its skin... j/k

Yes it's true, you can effectively use winxp forever without an explorer process running. If you remember dos that is!

b-kandor wrote:Yes it's true, you can effectively use winxp forever without an explorer process running. If you remember dos that is!

As I look to the left, on a shelf there is an uninstalled DOS 6.22 upgrade box complete with manual. That manual comes in handy every once in a while