Rex Trulove
You might have noticed that when your Windows 7 system has been on for a while, it tends to slow down more and more. This is partly because idle processes continue to use some of the RAM. The more processes that have been used, the more RAM is taken up by idle processes, which slows down the system. The following is an easy way of clearing this memory, which should make the system run a little faster. It also creates a shortcut on the desktop that can simply be double-clicked the next time the issue occurs.
First, right mouse click on the windows desktop, then click New and click Shortcut. The image above shows what you should be clicking on. This opens the dialog box shown below.
In the space that says “Type the location of the item”, type or copy and paste:
%windir%system32rundll32.exe advapi32.dll,ProcessIdleTasks
Click Next and give the shortcut a name in the next box. For instance, you could name it “Clear idle RAM”.
Click Finish and you should see the shortcut. To use it, simply double-click the shortcut and the RAM that is being used by idle processes should be cleared, which should speed the computer up a little.
A person can also shut the computer down entirely, wait for 30 seconds, then start it up again. However, sometimes this is something that would be very inconvenient to do, so this is a good stop-gap measure. Unfortunately, it doesn’t work with Windows 8 or 10. (There are alternate ways for those operating systems.) However, it should help with Windows 7, regardless if you are using a desktop computer or a laptop.
