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| | Mystery Vista Used Memory grows until Out of Memory and crash - howto diagnose? I have had an old symptom crop up again on my Vista Ultimate SP1. (This makes the operating system basically unusable for me.) Here's what's happening: 1. I boot up Vista - used memory shows in the task manager Performance tab as around 1GB on my 3GB RAM machine. The usual start-up apps: Sidebar, McAfee, Windows Update, etc. This seems fine to me, and the machine works fine too --- but only for awhile.. 2. Even if I don't run anything beyond the boot up programs and Task Manager, and just leave the machine to itself on the table, after some time the Used Memory will start to climb, 1MB at a time every 2-3 seconds until it reaches 2.8GB and the machine starts to falter (missing fonts displayed, locked-up, etc.) How can I track down which task, service, driver, etc. is using this memory? The used memory is not showing up in the task list, which continues to total to a reasonable amount and does not increase. There do not seem to be any strange or new tasks in the list. In fact, I can kill tasks one by one until the machine is barely there, and the Used Memory is still almost the entire 3GB or RAM. The only temporary "cure" is to reboot. This leads me to believe it is a memory leak in the kernel (Windows subsystem) or a driver. However, I haven't added or downloaded any new drivers lately. (This is a Dell Precision notebook) The last time this was happening (about a year ago), I was able to disable the Windows Search service and the problem went away, since this was triggering overnight and crashing with "Out of Memory" somehow. Trying that same tactic now is not working, however, so maybe that was not the problem after all. Is there a tool that will show me who's using all this memory? (2 GB of it!) (Remember, the extra 2GB of "Used Memory" doesn't show up on the task list or the Resource Monitor under Memory (except as the "% used memory" graph, which goes toward 100% and crashes the machine.)) Or... might this be an issue that SP2 will fix in Vista? |
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