Legit Reviews

I know that everyone gripes about "Where'd my memory go??" when they install Vista. This is very different.

I installed Battle for Middle-Earth II (nothing remarkable, I've had this happen after installing any number of programs). The problem is, after this program was done installing, physical memory usage was at 99% of 4GB. I'm not talking cached memory here, the Task Manager said 3.9GB used. I'm confused because no process during this time of 3.9GB used has a large amount of RAM assigned to it. On the contrary, the amount of RAM used by all the processes has shrunk dramatically to make room for some mystery memory eater... Unfortunately I could not get a screen-grab at this point because the only "functioning" process was the Task Manager. Even though the OS was slowly redrawing the shell, I could not move the mouse or click anywhere.

See this screenshot.


Is there ANYTHING in that which would suggest a reason for the HUGE memory usage? I have all processes from all users (one user logged on) showing and NOTHING seems to be using the gigabytes of memory that seem to be in use... As it stands right now I have 78% used. The only way to cure this is for me to reboot. What is going on?????

I don't know of anything that needs that much memory! (Except huge CAD models)

It is however possible that a shoddy program (or possibly old programs on Vista) are leaking memory. And if this is the case, the memory leaks don't seem to be 'mopped up' when the relevant program is terminated. Erm, no idea what to suggest to try and fix it.

Is it doing this all the time?

Dan

No, only randomly after I install some games and apps (it doesn't matter which ones, I've had a game do this and then not do it the next install). Like I say, I don't see any program using 2,000,000K in the Task Manager, just everything shrinking to fit itself into tiny spaces while a mystery process uses up almost all available RAM. A reboot always fixes the problem. My system "recovered" from this one, able to agonizingly come back from the brink, but it was still using 78% of physical memory just sitting still (again no obvious culprit in the Task Manager...)

Download Process Explorer, open it and click on the columns and click on select columns. Under process memory click working set size. Post a screenshot. Task manager sometimes misses things

I enabled the Working Set Size before I took that screenshot

The other problem is that I cannot reliably duplicate this issue...

Sovereign wrote:I enabled the Working Set Size before I took that screenshot

But you didn't download process explorer.

Dan