Memory problems...?

I must be blind or something, but I couldn't find any specific place to put this. So it's here. It can be moved if need be.

Anyway; my laptop has been running fine, if not exceptionally good, since purchase. But as recently in the past week, the memory has been... eaten up? And I've scoured the web for anyone else having my issues, coming up with only "oh it's Vista, it takes up a lot of memory even on idle, you don't have to worry about it."

Well for a little over a year, I haven't had to worry about it! But now... it's just bizarre.

Right now, (and mind you, again, this has never happened before,) my laptop on idle is taking up 1.75gigs and I only have 2gigs at maximum! And this wouldn't be a problem if I didn't get these annoying "low on memory" pop ups and program crashes!! I can't surf the net, I can't use Photoshop (which DOES eat up a lot of memory, but I was doing fine with it before now,) hell, I can't even have it on all day like I used to.

I'm a college student and I use this for just about everything. Homework, communication, telephone, artwork, animation, music and movies. It is my media center, my typewriter, my animation/cartooning studio, and my radio... and I NEED it to work properly.

Does ANYONE have any clue as to why this might be happening or how I can fix this problem? I can provide specs, but I wouldn't know how it'd have anything to do with this, since I've had this machine for a little over a year now with no memory problems to speak of until now.

Is it a virus? Malware/Adware/whatever? I haven't gotten any random popups, or suspicious activity alerts from Norton (Internet Security, that's what I use right now,) so... what do I do? Are there any instructions one could give me to stop any services or background programs? (Services, such as svc host, are currently taking up around 400,000kb or whatever--

Holy ****, okay, seriously, I got a C+++ error and Firefox was closed. Just now. WHAT THE **** IS HAPPENING.

EDIT: netsvcs are currently taking up between 400,000kb and 600,000 kb. My processes are taking up only about 100,000kb. There are TONS of services open and running, I do not know which to stop or if my memory loss even has anything to do with them.

Someone with more experience should chime in, but what I would personally do is backup all the files you need and reload the system with a clean install. Before you do this make sure you can reinstall all your applications and such.

This sounds drastic, but if it solves the problem it will save you hours of troubleshooting and you will have a computer that runs "smoother". My laptop see's a clean install every six months, but I have everything I need on my desktop so I am not worried about losing anything.

It could also be the hardware. Someone else should probably help with that.

I normally turn on a movie or something while I reload the system. Not a big deal to me, but it might seem like it to others.

If you dont feel comfortable with this or if someone comes on here and tells you not to do this, you should probably listen to them. Also you might want to wait to find out if someone has a really simple fix.

Hope this helps.

Jeremy

hello
i read somewhere before that (Norton and vista) don't work to good together.
download this antivirus software it's free and works great. avast! 4 Home Edition - FREE antivirus software - Download

do you recall what you where doing or what you installed around the time you started having the memory trouble? if you installed something try uninstalling it
and see if that helps.

scrooge

+1 for avast.

I'd be looking for a virus/malware.

I'm another one who would vote to get rid of Norton, it's the biggest resource hog going, if you want to pay for anti virus I'd suggest NOD32 but if you want free Avast is a good one.

Do you do regular maintenance on this machine and clean out all the temp files and other rubbish on it ?

Have you run scans to make sure that you don't have either virus or spyware problems ?

I try an avoid mentioning anything from Symantec in polite company. Do yourself a favour, and get rid of Norton.

I've been using Avast! since February, and it most defintely get's my vote.

I've been using Avast since Win98SE

Mustangsupra: I might do this in the future, probably when school isn't in session. Maybe during the summer when I can get a hold of some of my less computer-challenged friends.

scrooge: Well I guess I'm getting rid of Norton! I'll see how avast! works and try to ween my mother off of Norton as well. I wasn't really running anything. Let's see, Firefox... Windows Media Player... Briefly ran Photoshop... but I never let any of them run for more time than was essential to my needs. So basically it was open, do my thing, and close.

Joan Archer: I will try avast! and look into NOD32 immediately. And to answer your question, yes I do spend quite a lot of time getting rid of any and all unneeded files and programs. It's quite clean. Also, a small update: my computer is currently back down to its normal 55% of RAM usage.

Dzomlija: I have been hearing quite a lot of bad things about Symantec from... everyone, apparently! Not on this forum, either. It's just that I've been using it for SO LONG that I'm afraid of going to another product. Especially something free from the internet (I have had SO many blunders from freeware in the past that four computers later, I'm just scarred for life.)

So if avast! kills me, I'm blaming everyone else... so I HOPE all of you are right... because I'm not kidding when I say I'm terrified of freeware.

Mansrm81: Needs a new deodorant

Smarteyeball: So do I....

At least we wont get the blame if something goes wrong

Seriously though, Norton is a renowned resource hog and a general PITA and Avast is one of the current top free for home use A/V scanners for a good reason.

Norton was good back in the day when it concentrated on ONE thing only, but they lost the plot when they released a suite to do "everything".

smarteyeball: Well I switched to avast! about a week ago... and my memory situation is ALMOST back to normal. I still get low memory popups if I have, say, Firefox and Photoshop (CS2) open at the same time. But those are huge programs, and I can work around that by just having one thing open at a time. Memory usage is about 46% when idle now. So I'm happy.

I'd call this resolved, I think.

Good to hear you've got most of your memory situations ALMOST under control.
Photoshop is a HUGE resource hog, so no surprises there

Just an afterthought, have you tried memtest to verify that your ram is in good condition? I doubt there is anything wrong with it, but it can't hurt to check

Memtest? If you could please tell me how to do this, then I will! XD

Download and burn to disc, only scan 1 stick of ram at a time also it will take a while depending on what scan you do.

Here is the link to download.

http://www.memtest.org/download/2.01/memtest86+-2.01.iso.zip

Thanks Stephen, I was in a rush and didn't have time for a link

Just be aware that the memtest is a loop test which can theoretically can run for ever. If you do have any memory problems, it should show up pretty quickly. 2-3 passes should verify if the ram is good or bad.

mansrm81/smarteyeball: Alright, well I'll not be able to do this until I can get a disc, so maybe this weekend or some time next week. I'll post the results.

Thank you both for helping. :D

Hello Vickaronomie, and a belated; welcome to Vista forums!

You may want to have a look at the tutorial; at the link below. It can be used to change what programs start automatically when the machine is booted. This may be a large part of the problem.

http://www.vistax64.com/tutorials/79612-startup-programs-enable-disable.html?ltr=S

The most practical way to solve this problem is to add more RAM.....Just my two cents.
BTW: Avast is an excellent program!

Keep us informed!






Later Ted

Hello Ted, and thanks for the welcome!

How do I add more RAM to my laptop? I have it "maxed out" at 2gb. (Actually, I have to add more RAM to my PC, which runs XP, because it runs as slow as molasses, still even after cleaning up the drives and removing unnecessary stuff from Start Up--which DID help, but... I'm at minimum RAM, so I think it'd be best to add more.)

Anyway... At this point, I am not having any more trouble with my laptop's memory usage, since I switched the way RAM was being handled in my drives from Automatic to System Managed. (i.e. I followed this tutorial: http://www.vistax64.com/tutorials/132201-virtual-memory-paging-file-change.html )

Anyway, since I did that, my memory usage on Idle has normally been about 38%. (One thing that helped me was when I first got this machine, I didn't use the C drive for storage; I used my D drive and external hard drive. This ended up helping me in the end, since Vista is run on C, and I hear it can gum up the works by storing too much crap on C.)

In any case, thanks much to everyone here who helped!

My only issue now is... WHY Allware Sync is being detected as a Trojan Horse and Adware by Avast!, and why isn't anyone else anywhere on the internet having this same problem? (I look at the file names when it detects them and they say "SYNCAPP" which is the install file to Allware Sync, which I deleted already... which is why, when I opt to either chest them or delete them, the files are not able to be found by Avast!... So I'm a bit confused.)

So every time I use Allware Sync, this happens. And it's annoying.