RAM usage at 96% 10 mins after boot up - cant figure it out!

Hi Guys,

My friend has an HP Presario notebook which she is having trouble with and asked me to take a look at it.

In short, its Win 7 x64 Home Premium with 2GB RAM and an Intel Celeron CPU (i forget which model of CPU).

Unit boots fine, and logs on, but what struck me was it was very very slow. brought up task manager and checked the performance tab and the CPU was fluctuating between a relatively low level of 4% - 10% but sometimes did shoot up to 50% - to be honest, with it being a Celeron I kinda figured this could be "normal" as its not exactly a brilliant chip. - other opinions welcomed on that point!

However, the Memory usage as up at 1.35GB and continued to rise to 1.89GB - the machine only has 2GB of RAM and it literally took about 10 minutes to do anything.

I did the usual, Malwarebytes Anti-Malware scan - found nothing - Removed the rubbish Norton and installed MS Security Essentials - scanned - found nothing. Removed any and all of the HP Cackware and anything else that looked odd. The finally I removed a lot of rubbish from the MSCONFIG.

Rebooted the machine and checked Task Manager again - this time, instead of 88 processes running, I only had 63 running - but yet again, RAM usage was up at 1.35GB. The HDD is not full and has plenty of space.

So I felt stumped. Did some reading online and set the ClearPageFileAtShutdown value to 1 in the registry.

After changing the ClearPageFileAtShutdown value, when I booted back into Windows, the RAM usage was down to 837MB and fluctuated upto abour 1.3GB. I thought I had sussed it. So one more time I ran MS Security essentials for one last scan - it again found no issue but immediateley after doing this, the RAM usage shot right back upto 1.89GB and above and the problem instantly returned.

Does anyone have any ideas as to what might be causing this? Or what I might be doing wrong? Im trying to fix it without doing an OS re-install.

Anyone?

Cheers.

< Rebooted the machine and checked Task Manager again - this time, instead of 88 processes running, I only had 63 running... >

That's still 20 more than what I have on my machine. It'll be interesting to see what you deemed acceptable amongst those 20. Nevertheless, a good job dropping from 88!

It is perfectly normal to have about 1.35 GB RAM Usage at start up. When doing a virus scan, MSE takes quite a bit of RAM but it should be no bigger than 200MB IMO so post a screenshot of your resource monitor with the memory tab shown.

Thanks for replies guys.

Will do a screenshot tonight and post it up. :)

You can download and install CC Cleaner,Tweaknow PowerPack or any other pc optimization software and use it to optimize your PC.
And use settings like defragmenting registry ,cleaning registry,disk cleaner,startup manager ...etc.
Try to cancel programs from startup manager , as this will reduce the loading time of windows.

Solstice said:

Thanks for replies guys.

Will do a screenshot tonight and post it up. :)

Just as a point of reference for you:

A dozen hours after a fresh boot, I typically show about 1.3 GB RAM in use, with around 50 or 55 processes.

If I reboot again, total RAM usage in Performance Monitor drops to 700 to 800 MB.

I have only 4 or 5 items listed in the startup tab of msconfig.

You are using Microsoft Security Essentials now. What anti-virus was used previously?

ignatzatsonic said:

Solstice said:

Thanks for replies guys.

Will do a screenshot tonight and post it up. :)

Just as a point of reference for you:

A dozen hours after a fresh boot, I typically show about 1.3 GB RAM in use, with around 50 or 55 processes.

If I reboot again, total RAM usage in Performance Monitor drops to 700 to 800 MB.

I have only 4 or 5 items listed in the startup tab of msconfig.

You are using Microsoft Security Essentials now. What anti-virus was used previously?

Hi! Thanks for responding.

Before I put on MS Security Essentials, there was an expired copy of Norton Internet Security (blurgh!) So first thing I did was removed that and put on MS SE.

I would expect to see a lot of RAM usage after being on for a while, but this happens within about 10 mins of boot up. The machine slows down to the point where If I click on the Start menu, it takes about 2-3 minutes for it to show up - and Task Manager shows 1.89GB+ RAM usage.

I'll post up a screen shot of the Resource Monitor tonight.

Thanks again for the help! :)

Have you tried disabling Windows indexing service? I had a similar problem a while back and it turned out that was it.