[SOLVED] Memory use at over 50% when idle, loud fan, and system slowness

[brentatimm]

Hello! Over the past week, my PC has really struggled to run basic programs and a variety of games. I have had my PC for 3 years, and have never run into issues like this. The fans are running extremely loud, but the GPU temp is only at 30. Most alarming is my memory use is constantly at 50%, even when idle. There was a large amount of dust on my fans, but I cleaned that pretty well. No new programs / hardware has been added in months. Help, and thanks in advance!

Here are screenshots of Task Manager-Processes and my system.

http://
https://imgur.com/a/dC58vmN

 

[paggles01]

My first thought is that something has changed at the software level. Like bad programming or something like that -- resources aren't being used effectively by some new software. When was the last time you updated Windows? You can check update history in Updates & Security in the Settings app and see if there were any new updates around the time you noticed your computer getting slow. You could try rolling back the updates by following this guide: https://www.howtogeek.com/206271/how-to-roll-back-or-uninstall-a-problematic-windows-update/

I noticed about half your memory is in use but most of the processes you have running aren't using much memory. There must be a lot of processes running. Check your startup settings. If there are some programs that you don't need to boot on startup, disable the option to automatically boot them to conserve memory.

Anecdotally, certain hardware drivers can also conflict with Windows. For example, when I upgraded to Windows 10 from Windows 7 my fancy built-in Asus volume control interface had problems. After one particular Windows update the resource usage of the controls became so high that it was slowing down the pointer in some circumstances. Ridiculous, huh? At startup I'd immediately kill the process until the problem was fixed in a later update. The difference between my problem and yours is that I was able to see this in the task manager, and I can't see anything like that going on in your task manager. Still, be on the lookout for software that suddenly isn't working the way it used to.