Possible memory leak on an idle computer

Hi everyone,

I have an Asus laptop (N55SL) with Windows 7 Home Premium (64 bit) that I upgraded from 4Gb of RAM to 12 Gb about a year ago. I reinstalled the OS three months ago, and I tried to keep the system as free from cluttering programs as I could.

Since the last couple of days, my laptop started to act strange after a moderately long uptime : programs were incredibly slow to start up, and sometimes they didn't even start up at all. In some cases, Windows would even display an error message stating that there was not enough available memory and the OS became so unstable that I had to reboot it.

I checked the Resource Monitor for the RAM consumption and saw that it slowly made its way to 12 Gb, slowing everything down in the process and eventually forcing me to reboot. Of course, my computer has never acted this way before, and, while I understand that empty RAM is unused RAM, this is definitely an issue since it slows everything down to the point of my computer being unusable without a reboot.

As far as my knowledge goes, it seems to be a case of memory leak, but I lack the skills to pinpoint the offending program : how should I proceed to sort this thing out ?

Thanks in advance, let me know if I should provide you with other information about this issue.

Post a screenshot of Task Manager - Performance tab when the problem occurs. This contains important information not seen elsewhere.