Spiralling RAM Usage

Smarmore

I've had a Dell Inspiron 9400 for just over a year now with an 80Gb HD, 1.83GHz Core 2 Duo Processors and 2GB RAM. Over the last month month or so I've been noticing the laptop getting very slow particularly when returning from Hibernate/Sleep mode. I looked throught the Event Viewer and noticed a lot of critical errors caused when the laptop was returning from Hibernate/Sleep mode. I checked the Task Manager and noticed the Memory Usage was about 40% at Startup. However, over the course of about 20-30 minutes the Memory Usage steadily increases until it hits about 90-95%.

I checked a few threads on this forum, ran CCCleaner, virus scans etc. I thenk unintsalled some programs I had recently installed, e.g. Limeware and Skype. I then found some links to Vista tweaks and certain programs that are not required at startup. I blocked these programs from running and rebooted the machine, tweaked some of those things a few times until I got the laptop booting up at about 25% Usage. The laptop is operating like new on startup. Unfortunately the spiralling memory problem is still there. It generally stabilises at about 75% now with the laptop still performing well under normal usage. However within about an hour it creeps up over 90% again causing the machine to become very unstable and noticeable lag doing anything. If I set the laptop to Hibernate mode and resume the session the laptop always resumes with the Memory Usage at the same level meaning I always need to reboot.

Does anybody know what could be causing the memory to spiral like this? I have opened the Task Manager, hit Show Processes From All Users and hit Memory but there's nothing that seems to steadily increase and certainly not at a level that would cause the memory usage to increase by 50+%. The Memory Usage also fluctuates a lot and can often return and stabilise at about 50% before rising again. Any help with this would be appreciated because I don't know what else to do at this stage. Thanks!!

Fabio

Maybe formatting the whole computer may be your best bet and then reinstalling Vista or another OS.

BrendanD

You have done all the right things here, a clean install would show benefits, and you could also try and turn off indexing ,when you open task manager what is using the most processing power ?

ethernet

You wouldn't want to leave a laptop in sleep mode/hibernation for too long or else RAM usage will go crazy. It needs a restart now and again.

Ouijaboard

download a program called processexplorer, sysinternals.com .... its free, small and will give you a much better idea of the systems running processes than taskmanager will. .i.e. its I/O history and its peak mem usage while running on the pc. Check each process by inserting the name of process into google to see if its necessary or something that can be removed from the system. Make sure you have a back up of the important stuff on the pc before removing potential problem or unnecessary progarms or their related processes
I also think (but not sure!) that there is an update for suspend/hibernation for dell machines on windows update, heard of a few people having issues with newer dell laptops i.e. m1330 and hibernation.

Smarmore

Thanks lads, I didn't want to go down the road of formatting everything so I persisted with it and finally got the answer.

http://help.wugnet.com/windows/McAfee-Excessive-Hard-Drive-Access-mcmscsvc-exe-Problem-ftopict569456.html

So it was a McAfee problem all along. Thanks for the replies though. Here's another link that gives a bit more information about this issue. Still no update from McAfee to actually fix the problem...

http://searchtasks.answersthatwork.com/tasklist.php?File=mcmscsvc

ComputerNerd

i just read the OP there now, i was going to reply saying to make sure there is no mcafee or norton malware on your pc


glad you got it sorted, fixing is a bigger achievement then formatting

Thomas_S_Hunterson

Smarmore wrote: »

So it was a McAfee problem all along. Thanks for the replies though. Here's another link that gives a bit more information about this issue. Still no update from McAfee to actually fix the problem...

Use this as an oppurtunity to remove McAfee ASAP!

It's ****

ComputerNerd

do quick google for the mcaffe removal tool,

run it and install avg