I have a pretty powerful machine, yet windows7 tells me that it's low on memory even when explorer isn't running. Task manager says 3.51 out of 4gb in use, and the largest process is ie9 (52,668k) and dwm (14,660k) for all users. A reboot clears this, but it happens again. What's wrong?!
In the meantime, I'll be in Ubuntu 10.10 :)
Are you sure? If Windows is low on memory, it will first try to increase your page memory. Has it done this? What is your specific error message?
^That's right, Windows should automatically page to the drive if it's running low on free system RAM.
To the OP: what are your system specs? Are you sure you don't have anything else running in the background?
You can use Process Explorer to see what's going on in the background
Process Explorer
Also, have you disabled your paging file and/or are you low on disk space?
No, I have plenty of disk space. I'm just wondering why it skyrocketed to 3.5GB used memory with few visible open programs.
Now I have a different problem: svchost.exe is the biggest systemwide process, and I still have the leak.
Here's a Resource Monitor screen: Screen shot 2010-11-27 at 5.45.56 PM.png
What antivirus are you using? How many programs do you have running in your system tray/startup? If you have too many programs running in the background it can lead to running out of memory (for example, I only have 3 programs, AVG, OpenOffice, and Mesh), although I don't think that should be the problem since you have 4gigs, but you should look into it anyway. Also check out some tutorials on optimizing/tweaking/tuning up Windows 7 to improve performance and possibly clean up memory:
Optimize Windows 7
http://www.tweakhound.com/windows7/tweaking/index.html
Speed up Windows 7
Good luck! :)
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