Question High Memory Usage on Laptop

[Sage of Souls]

Ok, so I've been here before in regards to high memory usage on my desktop and we discovered that it was being used by one of Razer's services and was listed in the non-paged pool. Now I'm here because my laptop is using half of its available 8 GB of memory just sitting idly. I've downloaded and used RAMMap and Process Explorer (but not yet PoolMon) to see what's eating my memory. This time, instead of it listing a bunch of memory being used in the non-paged pool, it's now listing 4.34 GB total being used in the "Mapped File", 707 MB of which is in the Active column and 3.6 GB of which is in the Standby column.

If I could get some of you more experienced folks to help me once again with a memory issue, I'd greatly appreciate it because it's again beyond my area of expertise.

 

[geofelt]

First of all, consider if you can add 8gb to your laptop.
You usually can, and it is not expensive.

Windows keeps some amount of ram available for instant reuse.
Then, it will keep other unused code in ram in case you should need it quickly.
That is good.
A real overuse and shortage of ram will be detected by hard page faults.
That is when code is needed, and the page is not in ram.
Then windows needs to make room by swapping out less used code and replacing it with the needed code from the page file.
Your app stops dead until this is resolved. It is a painful process on a 5400rpm laptop HDD.
If your C drive is not on a ssd, that is one of the first upgrades to consider.

Run task manager/resource monitor/memory tab and look at the hard fault rate.
If you see anything north of zero, you need more ram.
Or, look at the tasks running that are getting page faults.

 

[Sage of Souls]

First of all, consider if you can add 8gb to your laptop.
You usually can, and it is not expensive.

Windows keeps some amount of ram available for instant reuse.
Then, it will keep other unused code in ram in case you should need it quickly.
That is good.
A real overuse and shortage of ram will be detected by hard page faults.
That is when code is needed, and the page is not in ram.
Then windows needs to make room by swapping out less used code and replacing it with the needed code from the page file.
Your app stops dead until this is resolved. It is a painful process on a 5400rpm laptop HDD.
If your C drive is not on a ssd, that is one of the first upgrades to consider.

Run task manager/resource monitor/memory tab and look at the hard fault rate.
If you see anything north of zero, you need more ram.
Or, look at the tasks running that are getting page faults.

This laptop is a few years old, so I don't think I'll be upgrading it. It's rarely used outside of my wife watching some videos on it at night to fall asleep.

There doesn't seem to be any hard faults, and I'm guessing the memory that the computer keeps is the memory that's on "standby", which, as of looking at Resource Monitor right now, is 2 GB. At the moment, having Chrome, RAMMap, Process Explorer, Task Manager, and Resource Monitor open, I'm sitting at 4.2 GB In Use, 2.1 GB in Standby, and 1.5 GB Free. 102 MB is Hardware Reserved and 138 MB is Modified. It says 2302 MB is Cached and 3716 MB is Available. I don't know what "Modified" is, but it seems to be negligible. However, looking at my processes in Process Explorer and Task Manager, I see no rhyme or reason why ~50% of my memory should be in use with just those processes open--around 38% in use when only Task Manager is open.

 

[Bob.B]

This laptop is a few years old, so I don't think I'll be upgrading it. It's rarely used outside of my wife watching some videos on it at night to fall asleep.

There doesn't seem to be any hard faults, and I'm guessing the memory that the computer keeps is the memory that's on "standby", which, as of looking at Resource Monitor right now, is 2 GB. At the moment, having Chrome, RAMMap, Process Explorer, Task Manager, and Resource Monitor open, I'm sitting at 4.2 GB In Use, 2.1 GB in Standby, and 1.5 GB Free. 102 MB is Hardware Reserved and 138 MB is Modified. It says 2302 MB is Cached and 3716 MB is Available. I don't know what "Modified" is, but it seems to be negligible. However, looking at my processes in Process Explorer and Task Manager, I see no rhyme or reason why ~50% of my memory should be in use with just those processes open--around 38% in use when only Task Manager is open.

Just for yuks.
Disable the sysmain service.
Reboot and see if it has any effect on standby ram.

 

[geofelt]

Then, what is your problem?
Windows is just managing what you have as best it knows how.

 

[Ryzener]

Why don't you consider installing Linux? My 13 years old laptop with 4GB of ram uses 250MB in iddle. It's perfectly usable for videos, web and even some games. I've never even used a swap file (equivalent of Windows page file).
I would recommend Arch Linux or Void Linux but if you are new to Linux you can try Debian or even Manjaro. You just need a Lightweight Desktop Environment or Window Manager (like lxde, openbox, bspwm, i3) don't go for Gnome or Plasma.

% free -h
               total        used        free      shared  buff/cache   available
Mem:           3.8Gi       250Mi       3.3Gi       1.0Mi       291Mi       3.3Gi
Swap:             0B          0B          0B

Edit: LXLE might be perfect for you but I don't recommend anything related to Ubuntu.