Free skill for Claude. Windows.

Get your speed back without closing your work.

Windows keeps running things long after you are finished with them. A helper left behind by a program you closed at lunch. A command that ended hours ago. A background server nothing ever shut down. They sit there holding memory, and every window you actually have open gets slower for it. freeram is one free file you add to Claude. Ask it to free up RAM and it clears out what nobody is using, while everything you are working in stays open and untouched.

Download freeram

One plain-text file, MIT licensed. Free, no signup. Windows, with Claude Code on your machine.

Nothing you are working in gets closed.

Task Manager hands you a list of names and no way to tell which ones matter, so ending the wrong one costs you an unsaved document. freeram settles that question before it acts. It measures how much processor time a candidate is using, waits, and measures again. No movement across that gap is the only thing that earns a close.

What it closes

Helpers nobody shut down
Programs start a background helper to do a piece of work and often walk away without closing it. The work finished this morning. The helper is still holding memory this afternoon.
Commands that already finished
A one-off script or install from earlier in the day, still sitting in memory with nothing left to do.
Runaway processes
Something that should have taken two seconds has been running for two days and keeps climbing in memory. Broken rather than busy, and it goes.
Anything whose owner is gone
When the program that started a process has already exited, nothing is left to shut the child down. freeram follows the chain and finds the ones with nobody above them.

What it leaves alone

Every app you have open
Browsers, chat apps, editors, office documents, music. They are named in the file before the first run, and it asks you which others to add.
Anything doing work right now
A process using processor time gets reported and left running, even when everything else about it looks abandoned.
Anything meant to sit quietly
A local web server, a database, a file watcher. Sitting still is their normal state, so freeram asks you before it touches one.
A window you might come back to
An empty terminal prompt uses no processor time, and that says nothing about whether you still want it on screen. It stays.

When to run it

Reach for it when the machine feels heavy and nothing on screen explains why. Fans up, every click a beat behind, memory high in Task Manager, and none of your open windows account for it. The pass takes about a minute, and you keep working through it.

  1. 01

    The afternoon slump

    You have been at the machine since morning, opened and closed a lot of things, and it has gotten worse every hour.

  2. 02

    Before something heavy

    A long export, a render, a video call that matters. Clear the dead weight first so the work gets the memory it needs.

  3. 03

    Instead of a restart

    Rebooting fixes this too, and costs you every open tab, document and window. This gets the memory back and leaves your desk the way you left it.

Worth knowing before you download

  • Windows only. Every step reads Windows process data.
  • It runs through Claude Code on your own machine, which comes with a paid Claude plan. A free Claude account cannot run it.
  • How much memory comes back depends on what has been left running. A machine at the end of a long day gives up far more than one booted an hour ago.
  • The first run asks which apps you keep open, so it knows what to protect.

How to use it

Unzip it once. Then ask in plain words.

"Free up RAM." "My machine is eating memory." "/freeram." Claude does the checking and comes back with what it closed, what it left running and why, and the memory before and after.

Claude desktop app

No terminal required. Windows, a paid Claude plan, and Git for Windows installed for local sessions.

  1. 01

    Install the Claude desktop app from claude.com/download and sign in.

  2. 02

    Unzip the download into your skills folder. Paste this path into the File Explorer address bar to get there.

    %USERPROFILE%\.claude\skills

    You should end up with a freeram folder holding SKILL.md.

  3. 03

    Open the Code tab, choose the Local environment, and pick any folder on your PC.

    Code → Local → Select folder
  4. 04

    Type "free up RAM" and let it work.

Claude Code in a terminal

Same folder, same skill. Take this track if you already live in a terminal.

  1. 01

    Install Claude Code from PowerShell.

    irm https://claude.ai/install.ps1 | iex
  2. 02

    Unzip the download into your skills folder.

    %USERPROFILE%\.claude\skills

    You should end up with a freeram folder holding SKILL.md.

  3. 03

    Open a terminal in any folder and start a session.

    claude
  4. 04

    Ask it to free up RAM.

Both tracks read the same folder, so the skill only needs unzipping once. Skills uploaded to the Claude website run on Anthropic servers and cannot see your PC, which is why this one installs on your machine.

We wrote this because our own machines kept filling up.

A long day of AI coding sessions leaves background servers behind by the dozen, and the memory never comes back on its own. Rather than close things at random and lose work, we wrote down the check that tells idle apart from busy and handed it to Claude. Take it, run it on your machine, and edit the protected list to match the apps you keep open.

Who made this

GraniteAI builds and runs AI for small and midsized businesses, out of Manchester, New Hampshire. We run what we sell, so what we recommend comes out of systems working in production for paying customers. This file is one of the small ones. The larger work looks like the Mica Intelligence Engine: an owner asks ChatGPT or Claude when to hire or what to charge, and the answer comes back backed by verified facts about their own county and trade, each carrying a source and a date. See the engine

The next free file

Claude now knows which processes on your machine to leave alone. It still has no idea what your business does. Point us at your website and we email you a context kit that makes ChatGPT or Claude answer from your business instead of guessing about it. Free, and you can read every file before you use it.

Build my free context kitSee what we build

One more, if the business you run is a local one. A feed goes quiet the same way memory fills up, one busy week at a time. Mica writes and posts for trades like landscaping and auto repair every day, so what a customer finds when they look you up was written this week. See Mica