Anyone who has used a Windows PC even for a day, knows that it comes with a file manager called Windows File Explorer. Windows Explorer has been with this operating system for decades. When Windows 3.0 was released it came with Explorer. After that the newer versions of Windows have continued to come with new and upgraded versions of the same Explorer. With time more features have been added and it has started to look a whole lot different from the original Explorer of Windows 3.0.
Nevertheless, one thing has stayed the same – Explorer is associated with loading of system settings for the current user. So if you have made any changes for the current user, then you can load them just by terminating the explorer.exe process and then restarting it.
Until the days of Windows XP, we had to manually do everything. We had to either give the command taskkill and then the start command to restart Windows Explorer, or we had to use Task Explorer for the same steps. Then in later versions of Windows, the feature was included in the Task Explorer itself. As soon as we select explorer.exe in Task Explorer, we get a button labeled Restart for restarting it.
Using a third-party application called Restart Explorer, we can make it even faster to restart Windows File Explorer. This tool is portable and comes inside a ZIP archive. We can simply extract the contents of the ZIP archive to a folder and launch Rexplorer.exe from there. It will instantly restart Windows File Explorer for you.
The tool also comes in 64-bit version but both versions work exactly the same. It has no GUI and also offers some parameters for refreshing or rebuilding the icons cache. Since it has no GUI, it can be used in batch scripts for automatically restarting File Explorer.
You can download Restart Explorer from https://www.sordum.org/9192/restart-explorer-v1-6/.