Memory Increased usage and Disk read/write spikes

TheWinslowWonder

Commendable
Dec 13, 2016
2
0
1,510
Since I moved into the dorms this year, I a college student, I have been having issues with memory. Before I could leave my computer on for days weeks even without having to restart, but once I got it set up in my dorm its hard to keep it on for a day without used memory getting to 60% with nothing open.

I am running 16 Gb of DDR3 RAM and have been able to deal with the problem for the last few months even trying some suggestions on similar threads but nothing seemed to work. but recently I shut down my computer for the night. When I booted it up the next morning my computer was extremely sluggish, opening task manager I saw that memory usage was already at 40% and disk was constantly at 100%. After about an hour memory settled to about 30% but disk stayed above 90%.

I have never had problems with this hard drive before so I was scared. Looking on some site I saw a post explaining how to reset virtual memory so I followed the steps, and found that my computer was using about 17 Gb of hard drive as virtual memory, so i reset that(down to about 3Gb) and disk usage instantly dropped to 1%. I then restarted my computer and it seemed to take longer than usual to boot, I opened task manager and disk was at 100% normal i thought for running start up programs but stayed there for about 10 - 15 min much longer than it used to but better than before.

I am still having issues with disk being at 100% for 10-15 min then returning to 0% but certain things will send it skyrocketing to 100%, things such as launching chrome, opening window explorer, opening a new chrome tab, launching steam, loading any kind of game, and sometime it seems random.

memory issues are also still a problem it seems like programs are leaking memory but I can have yet to discover a culprit, either that or my RAM is going bad and can't remove memory.

I have tried a disk check virus scans, and clean restarts none seemed to have helped.

Any suggestion or tips are appreciated if you would like more info please ask.


 
Ram usage:
Download Process explorer and run it as admin (it comes from Microsoft so its safe)

the default view is tree structure meaning like your task manager screen, it will show what processes under each service, but unlike Task manager, it shows the ram usage of each part so you can see what is eating your ram

Private bytes = actual ram usage
Working set = Ram + page file usage

This page shows what all the colours and headings mean, link at bottom of it shows how to use it to find problems. You can right click headers and run an av scan from within the program.


This might fix the hdd usage if it only started happening in last few days: http://www.tomshardware.com/faq/id-3267507/fix-100-disc-usage-system-service.html
 


alright thanks for the tips on Ram usage I will be looking into that some more. As far as the HDD fix it seemed to help but only for random spikes and for the use of chrome. Anything else I am still getting spikes

after watching my task manager really close for about a day my RAM issues seem to not be as bad as before. Also watching the disk while it spikes or i download anything the top thing. is System, and then sometimes switches to different service host processes not sure if that a clue but thought it might help