Task Manager won’t tell you what’s eating your RAM, but this free app will

We’ve all been there. Your PC is lagging, you open up task manager to see what is going on, and the graph shows you that 95% of your RAM is in use. Switching to the process tab doesn’t help; the numbers don’t seem to add up.

If you’re just doing basic troubleshooting, numbers that don’t add up might not matter—maybe the app using 45% of your RAM is glaringly obvious. If you need more granular information, however, it can be a problem. If you want to more accurately diagnose a memory hog, I’d recommend RAMMap, which is part of Microsoft Sysinternals Suite.

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I reclaimed the Windows Start menu by turning off these 5 features

Microsoft keeps stuffing new features into the Windows 11 Start menu, and with most of them enabled by default, it has become unnecessarily cluttered. Add web search results that have zero value—when I need to search the web, I’ll just open a browser—and you end up with a Start menu that feels bloated rather than helpful. By disabling the following features and options, I turned the Start menu on my Windows 11 PC into a lightweight application launcher and local search interface.

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Excel finally fixed its worst problems

For years, Excel was powerful but temperamental. You learned pretty quickly to walk on eggshells around your formulas just to keep things from breaking. But while most of us were building workarounds and muscle-memory fixes, Microsoft was quietly upgrading the engine under the hood in ways that weren’t obvious from the surface.

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These hidden Windows repair tricks fix corrupted files

Corruption is bad in any walk of life, but you certainly don’t want it in your computer. Yet when your apps aren’t working correctly, or Windows seems to just crash for no reason, there’s a good chance file corruption is the culprit.

If you’re really lucky, Windows will straight up give you an error message that cites file corruption or alludes to files being unreadable. Either way, there are more than a few ways to quickly restore corrupted Windows system files without doing anything drastic—like a complete hard drive wipe and reinstallation.

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