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.

Capt'n Midnight

hkw86 wrote: »

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.

Is it a problem ?

Windows XP used to swap stuff out of memory to leave room for user programs. It was so aggessive at swapping stuff out of memory that if you have more than 1GB of RAM then you are better off disabling the swap file, unless you get out of memory errors, to prevent this over zealous behaviour.

Later versions of windows handle memory the other way around, they don't swap stuff out until an application actually requests the memory. A lot of the memory will be filled with pre-cached stuff. And any new PC will probably have a good bit of trialware crap preinstalled.

So are you getting out of memory errors ?

hkw86

Actually my computer runs just fine. It never consumes above 3.2 GB for regular use (web browser, IDE, mail, I runs plenty of apps), but never below 2.0 GB when I close all the apps running.
I read in this thread that the problem with Samsung notebooks is Intellimem (that I can't find in task manager), and people who stopped that process/service make their windows consume less RAM (only 10% of RAM, maybe around 1GB).
I'm unfamiliar with Windows 8, so maybe there's something wrong in my way finding Intellimem (Task manager - details - then i look for intellimem.exe, but i couldn't find it).
So is it normal that windows8 64bit consumes that much memory? if not, what can i do?
Thank you

Overheal

hkw86 wrote: »

Actually my computer runs just fine. It never consumes above 3.2 GB for regular use (web browser, IDE, mail, I runs plenty of apps), but never below 2.0 GB when I close all the apps running.
I read in this thread that the problem with Samsung notebooks is Intellimem (that I can't find in task manager), and people who stopped that process/service make their windows consume less RAM (only 10% of RAM, maybe around 1GB).
I'm unfamiliar with Windows 8, so maybe there's something wrong in my way finding Intellimem (Task manager - details - then i look for intellimem.exe, but i couldn't find it).
So is it normal that windows8 64bit consumes that much memory? if not, what can i do?
Thank you

It is normal. The reason being it improves your computers performance, basically.

Not since XP has the computers ability to manage ram really been god awful. I remember installing third party utilities named after goats just to clean up the RAM in XP. Haven't had to do that crap ever since.

Reasons being the computer uses RAM where its handy to. Say you load up your web browser. Pow, its in RAM. Now close it. You probably won't recover 100% of the RAM you just had a minute ago, because even though the browser correctly deconstructed itself (coder talk) windows keeps a copy of the browser program fetched on the RAM in case you want to load it again quickly. This is really handy to have with even bigger programs, like word processors or video game clients. You'll notice during your session that the first time you launch Word (unless you have it set to run at startup) that it takes it a second. Close it though and come back to it later and you don't have that same delay.

This type of fetching is analogous to a real world desktop. Say I want to do my history paper. I go to my bookshelf, grab a laptop, my history book, notes, papers, etc. and I open up this big ass book. Every time I close the book, am I really going to get off my ass and put it back on the shelf?? No. Not unless my desk gets too cluttered and if I don't need to use that book frequently.

Basically windows does the same thing, it intelligently tries to keep your most commonly used programs and files cached in RAM to speed up your productivity. It also has the added benefit of fewer reads/writes to your Hard Drives and in particular any SSDs you might have, which are limited finitely in how many times it can be read/written in it's lifetime.

tl;dr - it's not a bug its a feature don't worry about it until you actually encounter problems. Even on an 8GB rig where I do a fair bit of multitasking and gaming I never see myself cap over 4GB of usage. It might have happened once when I launched WOW and Skyrim and a few web browsers together, but thats about it.

hkw86

Overheal wrote: »

It is normal. The reason being it improves your computers performance, basically.

Not since XP has the computers ability to manage ram really been god awful. I remember installing third party utilities named after goats just to clean up the RAM in XP. Haven't had to do that crap ever since.

Reasons being the computer uses RAM where its handy to. Say you load up your web browser. Pow, its in RAM. Now close it. You probably won't recover 100% of the RAM you just had a minute ago, because even though the browser correctly deconstructed itself (coder talk) windows keeps a copy of the browser program fetched on the RAM in case you want to load it again quickly. This is really handy to have with even bigger programs, like word processors or video game clients. You'll notice during your session that the first time you launch Word (unless you have it set to run at startup) that it takes it a second. Close it though and come back to it later and you don't have that same delay.

This type of fetching is analogous to a real world desktop. Say I want to do my history paper. I go to my bookshelf, grab a laptop, my history book, notes, papers, etc. and I open up this big ass book. Every time I close the book, am I really going to get off my ass and put it back on the shelf?? No. Not unless my desk gets too cluttered and if I don't need to use that book frequently.

Basically windows does the same thing, it intelligently tries to keep your most commonly used programs and files cached in RAM to speed up your productivity. It also has the added benefit of fewer reads/writes to your Hard Drives and in particular any SSDs you might have, which are limited finitely in how many times it can be read/written in it's lifetime.

tl;dr - it's not a bug its a feature don't worry about it until you actually encounter problems. Even on an 8GB rig where I do a fair bit of multitasking and gaming I never see myself cap over 4GB of usage. It might have happened once when I launched WOW and Skyrim and a few web browsers together, but thats about it.

Thank you very much. It's a very clear explanation (even for me who doesn't speak much English).
One thing still confuses me though, after boot up, before i run any apps, windows 8 consumes 1.1 GB RAM, after 1 minutes being idle, it consumes 2.2 GB RAM (and I still don't run any apps).
So, in analogy to real world desktop, what does Windows 8 bring to the desktop (so it takes 2.2 GB) when I haven't bring any?

Overheal

hkw86 wrote: »

Thank you very much. It's a very clear explanation (even for me who doesn't speak much English).
One thing still confuses me though, after boot up, before i run any apps, windows 8 consumes 1.1 GB RAM, after 1 minutes being idle, it consumes 2.2 GB RAM (and I still don't run any apps).
So, in analogy to real world desktop, what does Windows 8 bring to the desktop (so it takes 2.2 GB) when I haven't bring any?

I havent read too much into it but people have discussed how 8 supposedly stages the startup process, so that instead of all of your Startup programs trying to fight eachother to load alongside each other, it queues them up, and the OS decides which ones to prioritize (eg. Security software should by design load before Adobe ****ing Reader). It could also be contributed to by fetching data, that is once you've loaded the Desktop and are ready to get cracking, you load your browser etc. that the OS is anticipating the programs you will plan on using and begins fetching those files and programs ahead of time. That part is speculation on my end though because like I said I havent read into it too deeply, except to say that I have surely noticed the bootup experience is a lot smoother than it ever has been.

tehjimmeh

Overheal wrote: »

Reasons being the computer uses RAM where its handy to. Say you load up your web browser. Pow, its in RAM. Now close it. You probably won't recover 100% of the RAM you just had a minute ago, because even though the browser correctly deconstructed itself (coder talk) windows keeps a copy of the browser program fetched on the RAM in case you want to load it again quickly. This is really handy to have with even bigger programs, like word processors or video game clients. You'll notice during your session that the first time you launch Word (unless you have it set to run at startup) that it takes it a second. Close it though and come back to it later and you don't have that same delay.

So, while this is true in terms of how Windows handles memory, it's not entirely true in terms of what Windows reports as memory in use.

If you boot an app and close it, Windows doesn't zero out the memory that it was using. Instead, it marks the memory pages as being on what's called the "Standby List". When you boot the app again, it doesn't take as long, because Windows simply marks the pages as being in use once again, rather than fetching the data from disk again. However, the Standby List isn't reported as memory in use in task manager in the default columns (if it were, you'd see memory usage at close to 100% all the time), and can be allocated to any other app which is running at any time. As such, you probably will see 100% of the private working set (the default "Memory" column in task manager) of the app that you just closed becoming available.

SuperFetch is what you are referring to in your latest post. Again, this populates the standby list, and won't be reported as memory in use in task manager.

That said, it is true that memory usage is necessarily not a bad thing. I would say that if one is seeing a high level of memory usage in task manager on a new PC which is not running anything, that it might be symptomatic of bloatware installed by the OEM. However, I agree that unless you're seeing serious issues related to too much memory being taken up, there's not much cause for concern.

If you want to nerd out on this, VMMap and RamMap are great tools for showing memory usage in Windows.

hkw86

Finally found out the problem (maybe not a problem at all, considering my comp runs just fine).
IntelliMemory (Condusiv), in my comp is ExpressCache of Condusiv (i don't know if it's the new name or old name of IntelliMemory of Condusiv).
After I disabled it, Windows 8 only consumes about 1.2 GB of RAM (before I disabled it, it consumes about 2.2 GB of RAM).
I don't know how helpful this service is, but I disabled it.
Thank you.

Overheal

expresscache is usually term I've heard refer to Hybrid Hard Drive solutions. im tired and wired, but the short version is that software was probably offering you a nice performance boost on your loading times and frankly, I'd leave it on unless you actually require that extra RAM and its not just an OCD thing.

edit: yep,

The primary benefits of a hybrid drive may be created from a separate HDD and flash memory device, managed by software, such as ReadyDrive in Windows.[citation needed] A similar technology has been implemented by Diskeeper Corporation's ExpressCache software in Samsung laptops.[22]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hybrid_drive

I'd definitely re-enable this feature.

Capt'n Midnight

Overheal wrote: »

just an OCD thing.

Must. Resist. Defrag.

Overheal

Actually that wiki article is a good read, made me challenge a lot of assumptions I had made about HHDs. I have since set my desktop to not let my hard drives power down so often..