How to Reset (or Restart) a TI-84 — What Each Option Actually Clears

On a physical TI-84 Plus or TI-84 Plus CE, resetting lives under 2ND + MEM (the + key) → Reset, and it isn’t one action — it’s three, each clearing something different. None of them is what you want if you just need to clear the screen — that’s a separate button, covered below.

Clearing the screen isn’t the same as resetting

If the home screen is cluttered with old calculations and you just want a blank screen, that’s the CLEAR key, not a reset. Pressing CLEAR erases whatever’s on the current line; press it again on an already-empty line and it wipes the whole home screen’s history. Either way, nothing in memory is touched — your stored variables, lists, and programs are untouched. Save an actual reset (below) for when the calculator is misbehaving, not just when the screen looks busy.

The three reset levels

RAM wipes everything you’ve entered: stored variables (A–Z), list data (L1–L6), programs, and calculation history. Settings you’ve changed — angle mode, notation, window ranges — go back to factory defaults too. This is what people mean when they say “reset” or “restart” my calculator after it starts acting strange, since a corrupted variable or runaway program is almost always sitting in RAM. (It’s not a restart in the power-cycle sense — there’s no separate “reboot” button, and turning the calculator off and back on doesn’t clear anything on its own.)

Defaults only resets settings — mode, angle unit, notation, graph style — back to factory values. It leaves your stored programs, variables, and list data untouched. Reach for this one if the calculator’s behaving oddly because of a mode you can’t remember changing, not because you want a clean slate.

Archive clears anything you’ve explicitly archived to protect it from a RAM reset. Most people never touch this unless they’ve deliberately archived programs.

Which one to actually use

If the calculator is frozen, giving wrong answers that don’t match the math, or just cluttered with old variables and history you don’t recognize, a RAM reset is almost always the right call — it’s the digital equivalent of starting fresh. If it’s just behaving unexpectedly for one calculation (wrong angle mode, wrong notation), fixing that single setting is faster and less destructive than any reset.

Try it yourself

The TI-84 Calculator keeps this simpler than the physical device: open the Memory tab (next to History, Variables, and Functions) and use Clear variables, Ans & history under the Reset section. It clears stored variables, your last answer, and your calculation history in one step — there’s no separate settings reset to worry about, since display mode and theme are stored independently and won’t get wiped by accident.