Hiding Desktop Icons + Explorer.exe usage?

The memory usage of my explorer.exe process is usually around 13,900 K. I recently found that if I HIDE all my desktop icons (right click > arrange icons by > untick "show desktop items")....the mem usage for explorer.exe jumps to about 26,300 K (almost doubling the usage size).

Is this normal?

 

Hi
Don't really know but mine doesn't change 46,700K

 

Wow! Your explorer.exe processes sure take up much memory usage! In my XP partition the explorer.exe process uses only 4032k

 

I'm seeing the same behavior here; mem usage of explorer.exe goes up substantially when I hide desktop icons *and* I only have ONE icon on my desktop.....the recycle bin.

Interesting link with a link to Process Explorer (which provides a *ton* of information) here:

http://ask-leo.com/how_do_i_find_out_whos_using_all_my_memory.html

I found that just killing and restarting explorer.exe resulted in memory usage (working set) dropping from ~40,000K down to ~20,000K.

 

Is there a way to reduce the explore.exe mem usage?

 

Same here. All I have is the Recycle Bin icon and when I hide it, the mem usage for explorer.exe doubles in size. Weird.

 

I wonder what is happening behind the scenes? To hide the icon must store the image and instructions in memory, resulting in increased usage.

regards,

-rich

 

Yes it does but I don't know why, but I have 141 icons on the desktop and hiding them doesn't make any difference.

My Vista system only uses 6,500K but it has only the bare neccessities installed.

 

I suspect it must be services that start automatically (or otherwise) and then run in the background. I noticed a marked decrease after rebooting but it was still around 20,000K (same as restarting explorer.exe itself).

I'm not too concerned about it, just curious mostly. I've read accounts of others who have reported upwards of 100,000K in task manager without suffering any ill effects. I presume it's not problematic provided you have enough RAM.

 

Speedguide.net's explorer slowdown idea's - http://www.speedguide.net/read_articles.php?id=1404
In addition I agree with both prius04's method (discretion advised) and Rich's possibly .... 'not so obvious' comment.

Steve

 

I haven't used any tweaks to make explorer.exe use less memory and my desktop is about to explode with 50+ icons

 

Some things are better left alone. If you hadn't checked you wouldn't have thought anything was up. If you have icons, why would you hide them? If you want to hide them, you don't need them and you can delete them and use no memory.