Question High Ram Usage

[pierreandré]

Having troubles with my laptop. After opening my laptop I first check the status of my task manager and it shows there that 2% Cpu, 75% Ram and 100% disk is being eaten right ahead after opening. I looked up for what's consuming the ram and found the process "Antimalware Service Executable" sitting at the top using around 100-150mb of my RAM. What's weird is that how is it posssible that my laptop uses almost my whole RAM even though there's nothing running at the background aside from windows services (which obviously should be running). To double check I looked up to the users tab to see the amount of memory Im using and it shows there that I'm only using 383.3 mb of RAM. I have tried restarting, updating windows and turning off real time protection but it still feels very sluggish.
Would gladly appreciate all of your future replies. Thanks!

 

[rgd1101]

and this laptop spec?

 

[pierreandré]

and this laptop spec?

Oh I forgot to add,
It has
i3-8145U
4gb RAM
2tb HDD (if this is necessary)
Windows 10

 

[rgd1101]

not surprise 75% on only 4gb ram
hdd? yeah that going to be slow

 

[Bob.B]

Oh I forgot to add,
It has
i3-8145U
4gb RAM
2tb HDD (if this is necessary)
Windows 10

W10 and 4GB of ram is not a good fit.
Bump it out to 8GB and make your startup group skinny.

 

[Nighthawk117]

Having troubles with my laptop. After opening my laptop I first check the status of my task manager and it shows there that 2% Cpu, 75% Ram and 100% disk is being eaten right ahead after opening. I looked up for what's consuming the ram and found the process "Antimalware Service Executable" sitting at the top using around 100-150mb of my RAM. What's weird is that how is it posssible that my laptop uses almost my whole RAM even though there's nothing running at the background aside from windows services (which obviously should be running). To double check I looked up to the users tab to see the amount of memory Im using and it shows there that I'm only using 383.3 mb of RAM. I have tried restarting, updating windows and turning off real time protection but it still feels very sluggish.
Would gladly appreciate all of your future replies. Thanks!

4GB is the absolute bare minimum these days for Windows 10 to function smoothly, most of it will be taken by the OS and very little left for you. Only more RAM is going to fix your problem.

 

[CompuGuy71]

Best advice is to install 4 more GB of RAM and dump that clunker of an HDD for an SSD or see if your machine has a slot for an M.2 drive and load your OS there. It'll run you ~$300 USD to have someone to do it for you.

That 8th Gen i3 is not the best choice I've seen but you probably didn't have much of a choice. How old is this thing? I'm going to assume at least 5 years?

May be it is time to get a new machine. Just make sure you get one with AT LEAST 8GB of RAM and an SSD installed instead of an HDD.

 

[Nighthawk117]

What laptop do you have?

I would only buy a new machine with 8GB if the RAM is upgradeable.

 

[geofelt]

High ram occupancy is not, by itself a problem.
Windows manages the contents of ram, keeping the most needed in ram and keeping other unused code resident in anticipation of instant reuse.

When you have insufficient ram for your workload, windows swaps code in and out as best it can.
On a HDD, this is a painful process, some 40x slower than a ssd.
Start task manager/resource monitor/memory tab.
Look at the hard fault page rate.
If you see a rate greater than zero, you can benefit from more ram.
A hard fault happens when a piece of code is not resident and windows needs to bring it into ram to continue executing.

The advice to increase ram and to change to a ssd are both very good recommendations.

 

[pierreandré]

Hello I appreciate all of your replies! I do plan to upgrade my RAM for atleast 8gb however I'm quite not sure if it would be worth it since I only plan to use this for documents, excels etc. I'm just curious because I used this laptop for almost 1 1/2 since I bought this last 2020 it was running smoothly and windows doesn't take this much of my ram. But if there is no more way to fix this I might just buy a new ram. Thank you!

ps. I just ran my defender and it doesn't detect any anomalies within the system.

 

[Bob.B]

Hello I appreciate all of your replies! I do plan to upgrade my RAM for atleast 8gb however I'm quite not sure if it would be worth it since I only plan to use this for documents, excels etc. I'm just curious because I used this laptop for almost 1 1/2 since I bought this last 2020 it was running smoothly and windows doesn't take this much of my ram. But if there is no more way to fix this I might just buy a new ram. Thank you!

ps. I just ran my defender and it doesn't detect any anomalies within the system.

Post a screenshot from crystal disk info for your hdd.

 

[PsychoPsyops]

Antimalware Service Executable are Windows security measures and there is currently a bug that makes Windows Defender use more resources than it needs.
As far as 100% disk usage goes, I've seen on numerous occasions in my IT career, where the Windows update service sometimes hangs or gets stuck endlessly searching to see if Windows updates are needed to be installed, until the process is stopped.

I would also recommend upgrading to an SSD, rather than an HDD in the near future.