Saw this little tid bit of information on the internet and thought I’d share it.
If you need to free up RAM on your PC, don’t restart or bother installing a program, you can get away with just creating and running a shortcut.
On desktop, create a new shortcut and when the box appears enter the following:-
%windir%\system32\rundll32.exe advapi32.dll,ProcessIdleTasks
Select a name and when you need to free some RAM, run the shortcut.
Cheers for that Drezha 
so what does that do ?
how does it free ram ?
According to the blurb in the magazine, it clears up and stops any idle processes that maybe using RAM.
Cool will have to try it out not that I do run out of ram often…
Erm not exactly … its part of the background task schdular that in XP normally is forced flushed every 3 days.
Running that routine will in effect force though tasks that have not yet completed thus it may even increase your memory load by allowing certain tasks to run 
and may take 15mins 30 mins to run fully.
Direct from Microsoft
Idle Task Scheduling: The ProcessIdleTask API
The file placement optimization, which is done no more often than once every three days, is an example of a task that is carried out when the system is deemed to be idle. System Restore and other features of Windows XP also attempt to defer some work until the system is deemed to be idle. There are also some done-once-after-setup work items that also operate under the Idle Task Scheduling mechanisms.All of these “idle tasks” are controllable by a system API in advapi32.dll, ProcessIdleTasks. The APIs sole purpose is to allow benchmarks a simple way to force any pending idle tasks to be executed immediately, without having to wait a lengthy period of time.
The API ProcessIdleTasks can be called in one of two ways, from the command line or synchronously from a program. To call ProcessIdleTasks from the command line, use this syntax:
Rundll32.exe advapi32.dll,ProcessIdleTasks
When called from the command line, the ProcessIdleTasks work is done in the background asynchronously. It can take 10 to 15 minutes for idle tasks to complete. Task Manager will report processes running, and the disk will likely be active during this time.The ProcessIdleTasks API takes no arguments and returns a standard Win32 error code. The definition is:
DWORD
ProcessIdleTasks()The API itself is synchronous, so it wont return until the idle tasks have completed.
Hum… the thing in the magazine said it would go for a few minutes maybe and the disk would show activity…It didn’t say 15 to 30 minutes! :eek:
I have a method which I use on my work PC, where I can’t uninstall or otherwise get rid of the crap the IT guys put on it. This is only applicable to get more unreserved ram where closing applications or processes is not an option.
Basically open up some image editing application, and create a load of large images. I use 6000x6000, each one takes up ~100MB ram. Make some more until all physical ram is full up, which pushes old stuff into the swapfile. Then close it. Once things settle, the less used bits are shoved out and if not used, wont return again during the session. Anything that turned out to be needed will be reloaded on demand.
On my work laptop, which has 1GB ram, there’s typically 600MB+ used with Outlook open. After the above “flush” the amount allocated remains the same of course, however some 200MB is shoved out of ram into the swap and doesn’t come back. Which is nice.
I’m sure there’s dedicated software which does similar, but there’s always the old software policies…
Should look up cacheman nice simple and free
Start>Turn off computer>Restart = go get coffee
Works every time for me, I try to remember to restart at least once a day when I’m fulling loading a machine. Two pronged, sorts out the memory stack and means I get a break !!!
DT.
[QUOTE=DoubleTop;404788]Start>Turn off computer>Restart = go get coffee
Works every time for me, I try to remember to restart at least once a day when I’m fulling loading a machine. Two pronged, sorts out the memory stack and means I get a break !!!
DT.[/QUOTE]
thats what I do… Photoshop kills my rig with the work I do… so I reboot around 12am when I go for lunch! 