RAM all used up with Vista

Hi everyone,

I have Vista Home Premium on a laptop running 1GB RAM. Everything has been fine for the last year, until approximately 3 weeks ago. Suddenly things started hanging and going really slow even when I didn't have much open and according to a memory tool I have, between 75 - 90% memory is in use when only e.g. Outlook or Firefox is open. I have checked the start up programs and stopped anything unnecessary, I have also stopped the Superfetch facility which I learned on the Microsoft forum is not necessary and uses up quite a bit of memory. I've run virus and spyware scans both of which come up with nothing more than a few marketing/harmless tracking cookies.

Does anyone have any idea what's going on here as I really need some help on this? :cry I have also read that Vista supposedly needs more than 1 GB to run but a) it was sold like this (although I know that doesn't necessarily mean a lot but....) but b) my partner also has Vista Premium and 1GB memory and he doesn't have this problem.

I would really appreciate any help/advice. :confused

Thanks -Jules

 

Normally Vista uses about half the RAM in your case when idle. Have you checked Task Manager to see what's eating your RAM? Say if you're running FF, is it really FF that is taking up the memory? However, I have seen FF gobble up to 250MB at times for some reason which basically made it useless and I had to restart it. ATM, it's using 150MB but I have 17 tabs open. It usually doesn't take more than 100MB.

Someone else will have to answer about Outlook as I don't use it.

 

According to Task Manager most of what is being used up is with scvhost.exe - it shows up about 8 times in the list. I have cancelled things like Quicktime, Realplayer, Windows Media Scout - all kinds of stuff like that but the problem remains. When I said that Outlook and/or FF are running, that was only an example, it doesn't matter what's open or if nothing is, still the problem remains the same. As far as I can tell there isn't anything else running in the background that shouldn't be or that might be causing this problem. Conflicting opinions that I've read elsewhere suggest that 1GB isn't enough to run Vista but if it's been alright till now, ie for the last year, I don't think it can be that can it?? rolleyes

 

I ran Vista on 1GB for a couple of years and had no issues at all, so no that should not be relevant. However, the 'sweet spot' for Vista is 2GB RAM, but that's not your issue ATM. What is relevant is the sudden extra use of memory, I have 16 svchosts running, but then I'm running a lot of things.

Can you recall anything you did around 3 weeks ago when this started happening?

EDIT: To see what your svchosts are running, run svchost viewer 0.3.0.0 RC 1 and start with the biggest memory hog, and post the results here, someone with more expertise can then then advise you properly. Oh, you just have to run the program, no installation required.

 

BTW, my largest svchost is using 45.5MB, a few are around 5MB and the rest of the 16 are 1MB and less. I just posted this for comparison's sake. Something will jump out for sure.

 

Vista is a HOG for usage of Memory. As you have stated earlier you only have 1GB of RAM. I would go and buy immediately more memory from www.crucial.com and get 2GB of memory as a minimum. I've worked on various laptops with only 1GB of RAM running 1GB of RAM, after upgrading 2GB it actually made it worth spending time using the computer. No longer would you be able to make a cup of coffee before Internet Explorer finally loaded the website with a High Speed Internet Connection.

That's just my opinion.