Does closing Explorer.exe when not in use save memory?

The legitimate explorer.exe, a process, is an integral part of Windows. and Windows knows that; if you shut it down, it just restarts itself. Windows pretty much just plain won't work without the explorer.exe process running. Its more or less the means by which you do anything you do with Windows.

On the otherhand, the legitimate explorer.exe is a process, not an application, and it resides in %systemroot% ("%systemroot% is a variable ... usually "C:")\Windows, not in any subfolder within Windows or in any other folder anywhere else. Some yuckware will create a counterfeit "explorer.exe", which will be an application, not a process, often found in %systemroot%\Windows\System32, though it can be damned near anywhere other than in %systemroot%\Windows. If the explorer.exe you're talking about appears under the first, or "Applications", tab in Task Manager, its a baddie, it is a serious hinderance to performance, a security/privacy risk, and its got to go away. If, however, there is but one instance of it, and that only under the second, or "Processes" tab, then all is as it should be.

Ok timberlandko,
thanks for the reply. It is the latter legit process found in Windows Task Manager's Processes tab that you speak of, so I'd still like to know from someone whether shutting it off when leaving the pc actually saves memory/cpu usage that can then be redirected to running applications.
Thanks.

Up to you, really; prolly neither gonna help or hurt much. If you terminate it, and Windows wants it, which it generally does more or less all the time, Windows will just start it up on its own. You might free some resources for a while, but the savings will be neither particularly significant nor longlasting. Suit yourself, Windows will suit itself. One caveat; shutting down explorer.exe may result in stability issues under certain circumstances.

Just for info: This is what Answers That Work has to say about explorer.exe:

Thanks for the info. :wink:

EXPLORER.EXE IS AN IMPORTANT PARTOF WINDOWS IT IS NEEDED AT ALL TIMES, IF U END THIS PROCESS YOU WILL HAVE NO VISUALS ON THE DESKTOP

You don't NEED desktop visuals, or a taskbar, to operate Windows. They're convenient, and most generally used by just about everyone, but they're not mission-critical.

Plus, don't you think I'd already kind of noticed that the desktop disappears if I were making this post in the first place?

Guys, everything that needs to be explained or addressed has always been in that 1st post.

Roosh : yes you can kill every single process you want, until you've got the bare minimum -experimet with that.
Concerning performance - no. Especially file transfer, that depends only on disk speed/network speed, will not be affected - unless you have a very slow cpu (33 MHz or something).
Amount of RAM can affect performance - depending on how the 'file transfer apps' use it. Be aware that all memory in Windows is virtual -windows can and do decide when an application's memory is cached to disk to free up some RAM for other apps to use.

I am running some apps that use up to 2Gig of memory; in this case all applications (including the venerable Explorer.exe) get swapped to disk, leaving them with just a couple of bytes of real RAM.

Relative

Shutting down explorer.exe will have little if any discernable beneficial impact on file transfer, as noted by Relative. One thing you might get some benefit from, though, Roosh, would be to assign a higher priority to your file transfer application's processes. Not much else, apart from upgrading your drive and/or network connections, is gonna make any difference at all with file transfer.

These last two are helpful, thanks.

The reason I believed this method was effective in the 1st place was because I'd look at the Process list in Windows Task Manager and see explorer.exe's "Mem Usage' hovering around the 20,000K mark, and saw that ending it while away from the pc eased the "Commit Charge" a bit; taking it from 270M/921M to 255M/921M for example. However, since I now have your point about it being irrelevant to the p2ps' performance, I suppose that doing this is pointless, unless perhaps I were still at the computer and wished to use IE or Word and improve performance. Yes?

You could always give that a shot, Roosh, and see if it works for you. I doubt you're gonna be satisfied with what happens, but as I've never tried it, I won't make any pronouncement other than to express doubt and to say I would expect difficulties. But what the hell, it won't result in sparks, smoke, and snapping noises.