Ok, if you are running a laptop, you must have noticed that the more things you have running, the faster your battery goes.
I have been screwing around allot lately (learning) and I have found out quite a bit.

Irrelevant stuffs.
* If your MineCraft dedicated server goes down for over 5 min, you will get a mass amount of texts worrying about the end of the world.
* Firefox uses almost no memory next to chrome

Ok what I really was going to say.
The best way to check what is taking up power on you computer is by checking taskmanger (crtl, shift, and esc)  The set "Memory (Private Working Set)" to be from most to least.
You may notice that windows explorer is in the top 5!
For me it generally takes 60,000K memory thingy (for fun terms )
We all need to browse windows, but that is a heck load if you are just internet browsing, watching a movie, playing a game, or pretty much anything. I have one that will save 50,000K.

 Solution
1.  Open command prompt (you could alternately make a script to run a batch file once an hour).
2.  open task manager.
3.  end the process for explorer.exe
4.  OMG EVERYTHING IS GONE (kinda calming isn't it?)
5.  In Command Prompt type "explorer.exe /D C:\Windows"
6.  Your desktop hasn't returned but you may now browse your computer as you wish.

Sidenote: if you screw up and exit out of both cmd and windows explorer, don't fret, just log out and log back in.
Another sidenote: Don't do this if you want more than 6 windows open, as they are separate processes now.

?

Someone correct me if I am wrong, but I believe that RAM usage has nothing to do with battery life. If you're worried about battery life, you should be looking at things like CPU usage, GPU usage, screen brightness, bluetooth/wireless, and external devices.

Memory intensive processes tend to also have an effect on CPU usage.

Memory usage is irrelevant for battery usage. At best, those applications take more battery because they're in general more CPU intensive.

Killing Explorer like this will likely save almost no battery life. For what it is, Explorer itself is very lightweight. Disabling things like Aero, Seti@Home, torrents, etc... will have 100x more effect than killing Explorer will.

You'd be better off sorting by CPU usage and watching what registers over a 30 second period and killing that.