Big memory bump at startup

[Total Cereal]

At startup, after a minute my memory suddenly jumps up from about 2GB to 3, then shortly after to about 3.5. I can't find any programs that are causing this unusual memory usage. I've ran both avast and malwarebytes and neither helped, which probably eliminates the possibility of a virus.

Has anyone else had this problem? I can't find anything online that I haven't already tried. Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated!

 

[LMiller7]

Welcome to the forum.
Post a screenshot of what you see.

 

[Total Cereal]

Welcome to the forum.
Post a screenshot of what you see.

I edited my original post with a picture. I've since rebooted again and got even stranger results.

This was all without running anything other than the startup programs.

 

[DavidE]

To me 89 processes at startup is a lot.
Have you tried a Clean Startup?
http://www.sevenforums.com/tutorial...ation-conflicts-performing-clean-startup.html

 

[Total Cereal]

I did, and the jump still happened. I even tried it with the Microsoft services on and it still did it. I'm really at a loss at this point.

 

[Total Cereal]

I've discovered that the jump doesn't happen when booting in safe mode, so maybe it's a driver issue? How can I tell what driver is causing the problem, though?

 

[LMiller7]

The high memory usage is caused by the non-paged kernel memory which is over 1 GB.
Most likely cause would be a driver, in this case one that is not loaded in safe mode. Sorry, but I can't help any further than that.

 

[Ztruker]

How long has this been happening?

If fairly recent, what did you do around that time?
Did you install new hardware, update a device driver?
Did you do a Windows Update and was there a device driver update included in that?
Look at Update History to see what happened around the time this started happening.

 

[Total Cereal]

I'm honestly not sure when it started happening. I've only had this partition for a few months, and I feel like it's always had fairly high memory usage, I just never looked into it until today. A while ago, I did run a program that automatically downloaded and installed drivers (don't remember the name of the program). I'd have to guess that it gave me a bad driver and that's what's to blame.

 

[carwiz]

Windows has delayed start services so those will be included in your results. Not to mention that Windows does a number of housekeeping tasks like boot preload update, checking the system and updating indexes. Your startup programs can also be performing tasks like checking for updates, uploading your usage stats or other tasks. Just because you get the desktop after the welcome screen doesn't mean "startup" has finished. They are being completed in the background.

 

[carwiz]

A while ago, I did run a program that automatically downloaded and installed drivers (don't remember the name of the program). I'd have to guess that it gave me a bad driver and that's what's to blame.

It may have also given you PUPs and malware. It's not a good idea to get drivers from the "fix all" dealers. You never know what's being installed until it too late. It's better to get your drivers from the original source or OEM site.

 

[Total Cereal]

Yea, I've kinda figured that out. I might try reinstalling all of my drivers to see if that helps at all.