Windows 8 - high memory usage

natnifnolnacs

I bought a new laptop a few weeks ago. It is a pretty good spec, 6 gigs of ram, intel core i5 and some other good stuff. The problem is, whether it be hardware, software or a conflict of some kind it uses 80% memory when it's doing nothing If I boot it up, load into the desktop from the start screen it uses that much memory. If I launch anything, this jumps so throw chrome into the mix and it's up to 90%.

As I'm sure you can imagine, this makes it pretty slow and at times unuseable. I'm probably going to bring it back to the shop tomorrow, I'm just wondering if there is anything else I can try first? I have reinstalled windows already. That fixed it for a few days but it's now gone back to how it was. I don't have much installed on it and the only thing I have really used is a web browser but I'll uninstall that later to see if that helps. Any other ideas?

Meesared

natnifnolnacs wrote: »

I bought a new laptop a few weeks ago. It is a pretty good spec, 6 gigs of ram, intel core i5 and some other good stuff. The problem is, whether it be hardware, software or a conflict of some kind it uses 80% memory when it's doing nothing If I boot it up, load into the desktop from the start screen it uses that much memory. If I launch anything, this jumps so throw chrome into the mix and it's up to 90%.

As I'm sure you can imagine, this makes it pretty slow and at times unuseable. I'm probably going to bring it back to the shop tomorrow, I'm just wondering if there is anything else I can try first? I have reinstalled windows already. That fixed it for a few days but it's now gone back to how it was. I don't have much installed on it and the only thing I have really used is a web browser but I'll uninstall that later to see if that helps. Any other ideas?

Check your task manager to see what is using up the memory

natnifnolnacs

Meesared wrote: »

Check your task manager to see what is using up the memory

I should have mentioned that, sorry. I have been keeping an eye on that. there is an antimalware thing that kicks in every now and again(I believe it's windows defender which does it's thing when the computer is not doing much else) and there is something else I've forgotten. I took a screen shot of the task/resource manager so I'll post them in a while, have to head off for a bit now.

Black Swan

natnifnolnacs wrote: »

I have reinstalled windows already. That fixed it for a few days but it's now gone back to how it was.

I wonder if you have a security problem? Registry problem? And perhaps a clutter problem too, gathering cookies, and other junk from web browsing, that accumulates and slows your rig down after awhile?

natnifnolnacs

Black Swan wrote: »

I wonder if you have a security problem? Registry problem? And perhaps a clutter problem too, gathering cookies, and other junk from web browsing, that accumulates and slows your rig down after awhile?

Well it has windows defender as standard and I've installed MSE. Anything else going on as far as I'm concerned shouldn't be happening with a brand new laptop! I'll uninstall chrome and see if that helps as it does seem to take up a bit of ram when it's running. That doesn't really explain the machine running slow when chrome isn't in use though

Meesared

How much RAM does the machine have out if interest?

natnifnolnacs

Meesared wrote: »

How much RAM does the machine have out if interest?

6

Adyx

natnifnolnacs wrote: »

Well it has windows defender as standard and I've installed MSE. Anything else going on as far as I'm concerned shouldn't be happening with a brand new laptop! I'll uninstall chrome and see if that helps as it does seem to take up a bit of ram when it's running. That doesn't really explain the machine running slow when chrome isn't in use though

Doesn't Windows 8 have AV built in with Defender? When I upgraded from Win 7, the Advisor specifically said to uninstall MSE.

Meesared

Looking around it does seem like MSE is incompatible with Windows 8

Alun

Meesared wrote: »

Looking around it does seem like MSE is incompatible with Windows 8

The Windows Defender that comes with Windows 8 bears no relation to the thing with the same name in Windows 7, and effectively IS MSE, so there's little point installing it anyway.

Meesared

Alun wrote: »

The Windows Defender that comes with Windows 8 bears no relation to the thing with the same name in Windows 7, and effectively IS MSE, so there's little point installing it anyway.

I know that's my point

natnifnolnacs

Actually now that I think about it, I haven't put MSE on since I reinstalled windows. I'll double check and post that screen shot now in a minute

natnifnolnacs

It's currently running at 62% memory, but here is the screen shot from last night.

Meesared

Show a shot of the processes tab please from task manager?

natnifnolnacs

Meesared

Hm that's odd, nothing particularly out of the ordinary there!

natnifnolnacs

Meesared wrote: »

Hm that's odd, nothing particularly out of the ordinary there!

yep...I'm no whizkid but I know a bit about computers and it has me completely stumped. I can't figure it out at all, so it's going back in the morning.

28064212

natnifnolnacs wrote: »

yep...I'm no whizkid but I know a bit about computers and it has me completely stumped. I can't figure it out at all, so it's going back in the morning.

Can you get a screenshot of the processes (sorted by memory) when it's 80%? 60% memory usage is nothing unusual

natnifnolnacs

28064212 wrote: »

Can you get a screenshot of the processes (sorted by memory) when it's 80%? 60% memory usage is nothing unusual

Really? I would have thought for a decent laptop 60% while not running any programs would have been a lot.

Oh, if it helps at all, this is the laptop. specs are in the middle column on this page
http://www.notebookcheck.net/Review-Samsung-Series-5-550P5C-T02-Notebook.78983.0.html

All I know is that my 3 year old laptop and my 6 year old desktop work far, far better then this does. It constantly locks up, with the mouse arrow disappearing for 30 seconds at a time just because I ask it to run a few programs at once... The problem is I haven't figured out if there is a particular program causing the issue so it's hard to recreate (and to post a screen shot). If it starts acting up again I'll post a screen shot then.

natnifnolnacs

ok, I opened firefox,IE and windows media player. it jumped to 78% and started freezing a bit


And just in case it helps, I have checked for updates etc. The only extra programs installed are chrome,firefox, sopcast, streamtorrent and gmote. Apart from that it's as it came out of the box.

28064212

natnifnolnacs wrote: »

Really? I would have thought for a decent laptop 60% while not running any programs would have been a lot.

Not really. In actual fact, you want the memory utilisation to be high. That means that stuff is cached in the RAM of the machine, instead of having to be read from the HDD. RAM is much, much faster than the HDD. If only 50% of the RAM is being used, that means there's 50% of the RAM empty, that could be used to hold information that the CPU will need to access from the HDD instead.

Obviously, that's vastly simplified. There's lots of other things to consider, like the overhead of allocating which information to the RAM, but high memory utilisation is not a bad thing.

I really don't think your problems are related to the RAM utilisation, especially if you're getting freezes of up to 30 seconds. Sounds more like there's some process that's locking up the CPU. If you bring up your task manager, select options => Always on Top, sort by CPU %, then try and launch a few programs, is there anything odd happening? Did the laptop come pre-installed with Windows 8 or did you upgrade?

Meesared

28064212 wrote: »

Not really. In actual fact, you want the memory utilisation to be high. That means that stuff is cached in the RAM of the machine, instead of having to be read from the HDD. RAM is much, much faster than the HDD. If only 50% of the RAM is being used, that means there's 50% of the RAM empty, that could be used to hold information that the CPU will need to access from the HDD instead.

Obviously, that's vastly simplified. There's lots of other things to consider, like the overhead of allocating which information to the RAM, but high memory utilisation is not a bad thing.

I really don't think your problems are related to the RAM utilisation, especially if you're getting freezes of up to 30 seconds. Sounds more like there's some process that's locking up the CPU. If you bring up your task manager, select options => Always on Top, sort by CPU %, then try and launch a few programs, is there anything odd happening? Did the laptop come pre-installed with Windows 8 or did you upgrade?

Theres still something odd there regardless a system running idle should be running between 1 and 1.5 GB not 3-4

Vico1612

Try RamMap to gather further info
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/ff700229.aspx

natnifnolnacs

28064212 wrote: »

I really don't think your problems are related to the RAM utilisation, especially if you're getting freezes of up to 30 seconds. Sounds more like there's some process that's locking up the CPU. If you bring up your task manager, select options => Always on Top, sort by CPU %, then try and launch a few programs, is there anything odd happening? Did the laptop come pre-installed with Windows 8 or did you upgrade?

ok, maybe not, I guess that's the most visual thing I was able to find. It came pre-installed. I just sorted the by CPU% and nothing odd happening at all, it rarely gets above 10% unless I really start opening loads of stuff...

natnifnolnacs

Vico1612 wrote: »

Try RamMap to gather further info
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/ff700229.aspx

I downloaded it but I honestly have no idea what I'm looking at so it's not much good to me!

Vico1612

natnifnolnacs wrote: »

I downloaded it but I honestly have no idea what I'm looking at so it's not much good to me!

You can save the output to a RMP file, happy to have a dig around if you want to send it over ...

In RamMap, what happens if you go to the Empty menu and go through the options ?
Does the memory usage drop ?

natnifnolnacs

i headed down to the shop and asked them about it. They managed to find a process which was causing a memory leak. (Intellimem - it seems to be a piece of samsung software which was causing bother) Anyway, it seems to be sorted now. thanks for the help folks!

One other question though, does anyone know why certain websites won't display correctly? I've tried chrome/firefox and images mightn't load until you refresh the page a few times. Not a major deal, but my other major annoyance about wondiws 8 (so far...)

rica

i have exact same problem. just got it 4 days ago brand new laptop. samsung series 5 np550p7c. uses 87% memory with nothing opened

natnifnolnacs

intellimem.exe is your culprit I'd be fairly sure.

rica

indeed it was, i stopped it and my memory usage is 10% now. ty.

hkw86

I just bought Samsung notebook (NP530U3C-A02ID ).
When the windows 8 64bit starts, it consumes 1.1GB of RAM, after waiting for about 1-2 minutes being idle, it consumes about 2.2 GB of RAM.
My notebook has 4 GB of RAM. Is it usual that windows 8 consumes 2.2GB without any apps being run?
I tried to search for intellimem.exe (through search in file explorer) but I can't find it. What can I do to solve this problem?
Thank you.