Windows 7 - Physical Memory (RAM) Keeps Spiking & Slows my performence way down

Hello, I am new here, but have heard that the reputation of these forums is superb.

Anyways, as the title says, my Windows 7 PC has been really sluggish lately, and I have pinpointed it to be its excessive RAM/CPU usage. I have 4gb of RAM and a Intel Core i5 processor.

It has been fine up till now, I bought it June 2010, and only use it to browse, iTunes, Steam, and the occasional music torrent download.

I do virus scans on a regular basis, I try to do it at least once a week if I remember.

Anyways, below is some pictures of the issues. It can be really sluggish when I'm running only Firefox, or even nothing at all!

It might be a dust issue, but I could not get it to open due to the lack of guides of my model on the internet, and the fact that some screws got stripped. In spite of this, I tried spraying air dust on the outside of the PC's grills, some dust came off, but it didn't solve the issue.

I tried doing a msconfig, disabling "Load Startup Items" on the General tab, and clicking "Hide All Microsoft Services" and "Disabling all" under the Services tab. I restarted it, and noticed that the RAM usage was good at first, around "0.95gb", but eventually spiked back to around "3.5gb".

Please, if you have ANY suggestions, they will be welcome. I even got desperate and sent it to Staples Easy Tech Repair, but that didn't help any.

Thank You

Hi Fattieman and welcome to Seven Forums. When you open Task Manager click the Resource Manager button. In the next window click the memory tab to see what is using your memory.

Ok, I posted an image below that shows it. I'm not a huge techie, so I'm not sure what all those .exe's are for


EDIT: I ended the wmp.....exe, it cleared up A LOT of memory usage, but I don't know if that is the main culprit.

From the snip nothing looks out of place. you do have a wmpnetwk.exe running which I believe shares WMP over your network. If you're not using it you can disable it in WMP preferences.

If you click the Down arrow on the physical memory line you can see a graphical representation of RAM usage.

Thanks for the tip. I disabled "wmpnetwk.exe" under Control Panel, Administrative Services, because every time I ended the process from Resource Monitor, it would return eventually to eat up my RAM.

So far, just by ending this process, my RAM usage is normal, its currently at 1.15GB w/ 5% of the CPU active (all I'm running is Task Manager & Firefox).

I believe this may have been the culprit, but if something else comes up, I will know where to turn.

Thanks a lot!

You're welcome.