We all are aware, and familiar with the three keyboard shortcuts; ctrl+c, ctrl+x, and ctrl+v. These are the keyboard shortcuts for copy, cut and paste operations on windows computers. When we copy or cut any piece of information it gets saved in a memory part called as clipboard. Clipboard is like a temporary location somewhere in the RAM which holds the copied data till the time you paste it to the destination. In some cases the clipboard keeps the data in itself even after pasting it on to the desired location. Clipboard can store any kind of content be it and image, or text, or any other piece of information which can be edited in any software on your computer. Clipboard holds the information till the time you don’t copy something else, and it keeps on erasing the old information and holds the latest one.
In Windows XP there was a tool located in …\Windows\System32 with the name of Clipbrd.exe. With this tool you could see what information is saved in clipboard currently and you could empty the clipboard if required. This tool was a Microsoft tool and was bundled in the operating system by default. Bundling of this tool in operating system was discontinued by Microsoft in Windows Vista and Windows 7. So what if you want to manually erase the contents of clipboard? To do so in Windows 7 you will have to create a shortcut which when executed will execute a command for emptying the clipboard. Given below is the method of creating the shortcut.
Minimise all the screens and then right click anywhere on the empty space on the Desktop. This will give you the context menu and you have click on New and then on Shortcut. This will present you with create shortcut Wizard and the first screen of this wizard will ask you for the location of application for which you are creating the shortcut. In “Type the location of the item:” box please type cmd /c “echo off | clip”. Type all the text written in Bold along with quotes. Click on next. On the next page the wizard will ask the name of the shortcut and you can type the name as “Clear ClipBoard” or “Empty Clipboard”. Click on Next, the wizard will exit, leaving behind a shortcut on your desktop for clearing the clipboard. This shortcut will work as a hotkey for you to erase the contents of the clipboard and free the memory.
Anything which we copy or cut stays in the memory and consumes space. This could result in low performance and so we might need to free up the same if we feel that we had copied a large amount of data and would not need it again. This hotkey will be of good use in emptying the RAM space and giving you more free space for running applications. There are many third party tools available on the internet which also solves the same purpose but why to use a non-Microsoft tool if you can make one yourself with so ease.
