What's your memory assessment speed? [2]

clancy31 said:

This is a DELL VOSTRO laptop with OS Win 7 Pro 64 bit laptop. I get a low memory warning after a few minutes of internet use. I have run all the programs (PC claeaner, TuneUp Utility 13) I can find and cannot get the system to perform normally. Using the task manager the IE usage rapidly gets to 350,000KB. How can I limit this or work around it? Any suggestioned will be appreciated.

Only using 350mb...? That's actually pretty low, especially for IE.. If you look at my attached screenshot, Chrome is currently using up over 1GB of my RAM.

As for memory usage vs performance, you might find the info in this answer on the MS community forums somewhat helpful.

essenbe said:

Second I would uninstall PC cleaner and Tune up utility and any other such programs you have. Those programs are counter productive with Windows 7 and will ruin an OS. Dell ships completely full of trial programs and other stuff that will keep the OS from running as efficiently as possible. You may want to consider, Clean Reinstall - Factory OEM Windows 7 after that, I think you will find your system runs much better.

Personally I wouldn't brand all PC health type applications as counter productive, although I'll admit I have seen many of them damage a Windows installation. I've used TuneUp Utils (both 2011 and now 2012) on my setup since I first got Win7. As with anti-virus programs though, it's more damaging to try use more than one app like that at a time, often they both end up trying to do similar things at the same time and they have conflicts.

I've had the same install for almost 2 years now, which has survived 5 different graphics cards (including ATI and Nvidia), 4 CPUs, countless virus scares and actual infections, and recently a complete motherboard change.. It's still running beautifully. But having a fake PC health app, or a even good one setup incorrectly, definitely has a heavy impact.

At the end of the day though, I'd say it's a combination of all the things done to and in Windows that make the biggest difference to system reliability and stability. A clean install will always be a nice fresh start, but if you apply the same mentality to how you maintain Windows after that, the whole cycle will repeat yet again.

Britton30 said:

Tune Up Utilities must be used with a deft hand. I've used it since 2005 with XP. w7 is much different so I don't use their Turbo mode or let it decide what programs to disable. I mainly use the System configs and icon packs. The Tune Up defrag is not used either, the built in one works fine.

I don't use the turbo mode either, or any of the other live optimisation features.. Pretty much all I use from it is the scheduled maintenance option to do drive and registry defrags, and set it to watch for programs I haven't run in 3 months. Basically just to try keep the areas of Windows that tend to change more often under slightly better control. Works pretty well for me.

Thanks for the suggestions. I was running some of the Windows help programs (wish I had known about them earlier) and in test it reported that either I didn't have an antivirus or it was not performing. Norton (I have 360) ran tests for about 4 hours and said they found a few problems. I ran the same Windows Health System test and got the same results. The Norton Tech said that the test was bad. I found several programs that I had not intended to install that I was able to delete (they apparenty loaded when I installed Chrome and Foxfire even though I opted NO to every thing but the basic browser). I still get the IE warning that memory is low and I should close the program. I am going to go through the suggestions made here and see if I can get it back to where it was a week or so ago. Thanks again for all the suggestions and kind words. ><>clancy<><

I will, my son has recommended I do a clean restore, if I continue to have problems, I will post them on the other thread. Thanks.

Acer laptop 5745DG; i3-370M 2.46GHz 3MB L3 cache; 4GB DDR3

Windows System Assessment Tool
> Running: Feature Enumeration ''
> Run Time 00:00:00.00
> Running: System memory performance assessment ''
> Run Time 00:00:05.10
> Memory Performance 5867.12 MB/s
> Total Run Time 00:00:06.71