Help PC run faster?

[Joe Harkin]

Slightly OT question for Dan, Rick, or any other PC 'guru' out there. Hope it's useful to general population: How to reset/release memory and speed the system back up w/o doing a restart?
I have a 5yr old Dell Dim.4600, P4@2.4Ghz, 1MB RAM, XP-Pro/SP3, ATI A-I-O 9000Pro video card w/64MB (weak, but it works and not ready to but a Quadro FX yet). I run everything on this one machine - eCab, Firefox, email, QB Pro, Quicken, etc-etc-etc. Sometimes in-out of several of them (and others) during the day. I'm a solo custom remodeler and love the design flexibility of eCab (but not the learning curve), usually building by hand. I'm also a semi-techie from a prior life and spend WAY too much time trying new stuff keeping the system 'clean' via utilities like CCleaner, EasyCleaner, Reg cleaners and defraggers.
I have read that Windows often does not 'release' memory that has been "assigned' to an application after that app is closed, and so the 'sludge' builds up and slows down the system until you do a Windows restart. Problem is it takes my system a LONG time to fully shut down & restart so I avoid it as much as possible. So finally here's the question - is there a 'shortcut' way to 'flush' the 'held' resources without doing a full restart ?
One suggestion I read was to open TaskMgr (Ctrl-Alt-Del), shut down explorer.exe, and then re-start it.
Any suggestions ?

[DanEpps]

Windows automatically cleans up resources used by an application after it closes via a process known as "garbage collection" and you needn't worry about doing it yourself.