Ok, so maybe this is more a question for the superuser site but I figured there'd be a hell of a lot more emacs users on stackoverflow.

Basically I often have my emacs split into about 4 windows so I can look at a bunch of buffers at the same time.. however I'd like to be able to C-x 1 (make the window the same size as emacs) and then somehow restore back to my nice 4 window layout I was just looking at.

Is there an easy way to do this or do I need some elisp / lisp (note: I don't know ANY elisp.)

Thanks!
John.