Windows 7 using up all my memory on random times

Hi,
I just recently got a copy of Windows 7 professional from my University. Seemed like a good time to upgrade my vista laptop. I did a clean install of windows on my laptop and installed only the necessary drivers and couple of programs (crypt load + msn, Skype). Everything was working perfectly until i realized that sometimes the computer just started responding very slowly to everything. Found out that the system was using almost 90% of my 2GB ram memory. I checked the task manager but can't find what's wrong... It just starts on random times going crazy. I have to reboot the system to get it to drop again. Even if I close every running program it still won't drop. Can anyone help me out here or is my system playing games on me...??

 

memory is meant to be used. all of it.

having said that, task manager is probably the worst tool you can use to find out if you have a 'problem'.

You need to become familiar with and use tools like sysinternals process monitor and vmmap

 

Win7 will use all the spare memory but it's supposed to "release" it as soon as any applications need it. If the system is slowing down then perhaps it's not releasing memory for some reason. Worth investigating further using the programs newsposter mentioned.

 

hmm Try Resource Monitor ... it should give a good idea about what's eating up the memory

 

give it a few days, might be indexing since you said you just installed it. Mine randomly shot up CPU/Mem usage for like 3-4 days when I first installed, now its fine.

 

I get low memory low warnings in Vista and W7 with 3GB of memory and i have very little running.

I managed to get a free util to manage my memory better now to says i have 70% free in W7.

 

What is the utility that you are using?

 

This has happened to me too, in 7, never in Vista.. It was no program that used the RAM it was the system according to resource monitor or whatever its called..

Sadly i have no solution for you, what i did was to format

 

I use advanced system care, it has lots of functions to optimize your notebook, but one of the independent utils is called smart memory , you can set it to auto load at startup.

Once installed, run it then click, the utilities tab and select smart memory , then click settings and tick them all and re-boot your notebook.

http://www.iobit.com/advancedwindowscareper.html?Str=download

 

Well, here is a small solution to your problem and by no means a complete fix: Plug in a usb drive, when autoplay appear click ReadyBoost.

This should help a bit.

I got 4GB RAM and Win 7 took 2 gigs off it any time. So I plugged two of my 4GB fingers and you do the math. 12 giggggs RAM!

Well, only works for 64-bit version to have this much RAM.

 

Windows isn't supposed to use *that* much.

For the OP, 42 running processes on an absolutely idle, "just booted" install is kind of high but not abnormally depending on your hardware. Show us task manager when it goes all high RAM like that.

 

Don't know if this would help but have you tried defragging and CClean the registry after installing? It took me 12 hours~ to defrag and rebooted several times before my computer calm downed.

 

I'd call 42 processes pretty low for Win7, depending on what else is installed. My fresh Win7 install, with all drivers present and a few Lenovo apps, was running at 56 processes -- after the 80+ of Vista I was stoked!

 

Hi to all
Window 7 has a good Backup or upgrade control. In the first step of installation of window 7 say that we should back up our old files as they will be deleted then if force an option of where our old windows files will be backed up into windows backup folder.
I am very excited by this feature of windows 7. So that is why i want to download a Window 7 OS.

 

to the op: you should have alot more available than that on startup, try resource monitor or process monitor and see what is hogging all your memory and don't use cache/memory managers as they don't work as they are snake oil as letting windows handle it is best.

 

Vista and Win 7 are designed to do that. People used to B*tch about vista because of it (claimed it was a memory hog) what it does is cache recently used programs in ram to speed up the loading process. It's actually a good thing but for about a year it was a major sticking point for new vista users and a lot of them went back to XP because of it.

That said I have 8 gigs of ram and Win 7 normally only uses 5-6 gigs. I've never seen it use ALL of the ram. Yet.