Patent ID: 7895528

Claim:
A computer implemented method comprising: receiving one or more window close requests from a user, each of the window close requests corresponding to a different window visible on a computer display and actively managed by an operating system, wherein data pertaining to each of the windows is stored in a memory; retaining the data pertaining to each of the windows and inactivating each of the windows in response to receiving the window close requests, wherein the inactivating results in the windows no longer being visible on the computer display and the operating system no longer actively managing the inactivated windows and storing an inactivation timestamp for each of the inactivated windows, which results in one or more inactivation timestamps, wherein each of the inactivation timestamps corresponds to a time at which its corresponding window was inactivated; reading one or more user-definable reclamation settings wherein one of the user-definable settings is a time limit; retrieving a current timestamp; comparing the difference between each of the inactivation timestamps and the current timestamp to the time limit; in response to determining that the difference between a first inactivation timestamp that is included in the one or more inactivation timestamps and the current timestamp is greater than the time limit, deleting the data pertaining to a first inactivated window that corresponds to the first inactivation timestamp, the deleting resulting in reclamation of the memory used to store the deleted data; obtaining a window recover request from the user subsequent to inactivating the window, the window recover request including a selection of a second inactivated window that corresponds to a second inactivation timestamp included in the one or more inactivation time stamps whose difference between the second inactivation timestamp and the current timestamp results in a difference that is less than the time limit; and reactivating the second inactivated window so that the second window is again visible on the computer display and is actively managed by the operating system.