Memory Leak

[chelslam]

About five days ago I began having problems with my physical memory leaking from start-up. I'm running Vista Home Premium on a Dell Inspiron 1521 notebook, 160G hard drive and 2G RAM. When I open task manager right at start-up, I have around 700mb of free physical memory, but over the course of 2-3 minutes that amount drains to about 0-15 free mb. At the time of the "memory drain", my CPU is running at 99%, and once I've lost most of my physical memory the CPU goes down to about 3% with intermittent spikes of up to 90%. I also noted that I have 13 instances of svchost.exe, and when I run the resource monitor during the "drain" it is svchost using most of the memory, disk, and CPU. I've tried running the memory diagnostic tool, disk clean-up, disk defragmentor, full system virus scan, Dell system scan, two different PC file/registry clean-up programs, and restarting my computer after disabling ALL start-up programs w/ msconfig, on top of contacting Dell twice. The only time I don't have this memory issue is when I run my computer on safe mode. If someone has any idea what could be causing this, please let me know!

 

[rav-e]

Your pc is just caching your unused memory. It is not leaking dude. Vista manages memory differently then previous operating systems. Hmn let me put this into words - Vista is designed to use your free unused memory into a cache called "super fetch" which in turn allows you to make use of all your ram instead of it being wasted. What "super fetch" does is it caches all of your frenquently used programs etc. into your unused memory. And of course we all know that ram works much much faster than a hard drive. It really does speed up your computer. And whenever you need that cached memory for lets say an application, Vista will make room for it instantly replacing the cache with your program. And over time Vista will study your computing habbits and cache the things you use more frenquently and not caching the things you do not. "Super fetch" is one of the many great features Vista has to offer.

-rav-e