Reboot Without Rebooting?

29th September 2006

You know how sometimes your computer gets all bogged down needs a reboot? I’m not talking about a spyware infested mess, I’m talking about a well maintained, virus free workstation, that just needs to be rebooted to “clear it’s throat” and let you get back to work.
I knew mine needed to be rebooted because it was sluggish even after closing everything. When I hit CTRL - ALT - DEL, to review the remaining running processes, my “explorer.exe” program was using over 130,000 k of memory.

I didn’t want to wait for the 3 minutes or so (sad, huh?) that it would take to reboot my computer, so I hit “end process” on explorer.exe, and that memory sucking process stopped immediately. Since explorer.exe is the Windows desktop, all of my icons and the Start button disappeared.

No problem though. In the Windows Task Manager (the CTRL-ALT-DEL screen)   I went to File - New Task - and typed “explorer.exe” (without the quotes) and BAM - I’m back in business with explorer.exe using only 27,000k of memory, and the whole process took me about 10 seconds.
This won’t solve every problem, but if you notice explorer.exe siphoning off your productivity, this will fix it quick.