Hi Folks.

I've had a frustrating couple of days here as both my laptop and my desktop (which is a dinosaur by any measure) have been giving me nothing but grief.  And today, the desktop froze up (no, my platform was not running so that was not the issue ) and my laptop kept rebooting and making my screen incons about 5 times larger than I wanted or needed.

In the past this was a signal to run out and get a new computer.  I've taken them to repair shops before and in the end the cost to repair was pretty much the same as the cost to replace.

So I was all geared up to get some new equipment when I noticed one of the little warning boxes on my laptop read something to the effect of "memory full".

I'd never heard of such a thing, but apparently RAM memory can fill up just like a hard drive if you have programs leaking into it and other causes I don't claim to begin to understand.

So a quick spin through Google turned up pages and videos devoted to cleaning out the RAM memory chips for systems running Windows 7, Windows 8 and Windows 10.  There are probably pages for earlier versions of Windows but I didn't look for them.

And all you are required to do is open Notepad and type in 1 or 2 lines of code (and they give you the code to type) and then run the program you just created in Notepad.  I did this on both of my machines and they are working as well right now as they did when I brought them home from the store.

So here are some links to some pages that will walk you through the process.  Two are YouTube videos and the last is a static web page.  This only takes about 2 minutes to complete from start to finish, so even if you don't think you need this sort of program now it coldn't hurt to have the files created and ready for the time when you will need them.

Windows 7:  https://youtu.be/UQ6B5PZKVTY

Windows 8:   https://youtu.be/wZpJNtr-qrg  

Windows 10: https://www.compsmag.com/clean-ram-windows-using-notepad/

Given the number of issues I've dealt with over the last couple of years with students who were having multiple problems running my software on their computers, I figured there would be quite a few of you out there who might find this helpful.  So I hope that it is and it brings some older machines back to life.

Jeff