My friends laptop (see other thread) has been having an issue, and I'd like to try to help him fix it since it will be his only means for entertainment while in the hospital for who knows how long...

Basically, from what I can tell, his machine is not clearing the memory like it should be. He has 4GB of memory, and as soon as he starts the machine up, windows loads up and everything fine, but you can bring up the task manager and just watch the memory slowly drop all the way to about 40, then it runs like crap until he tries to do something heavy enough that the machine locks up. We've already checked for spy/ad/mal/virus wares, clean. I've already gone through his processes and dumped anything that even looked remotely unnecessary, no good.

Basically, at this point, I think he should format (he's probably due for one anyway...) and if it still does it after that, then its a hardware issue, maybe motherboard/memory I dunno.

I seek the collective wisdom that is the Massassi Temple Tech Support.

Well Vista has superfetch, but it should give away the ram it uses as soon as you need it.

I like your current plan - format/reinstall, test again. If it still a problem, he probably has hardware issues.

Vista will attempt to utilize a large amount of your available memory, thats not uncommon but it shouldnt be resulting in crappy performance / lockups.

Make sure task manager is showing programs from all users. If no one program appears to be running away with memory, I can only assume a) a driver is eating up the memory b) it's 64-bit Vista since 32-bit would BSoD once the 2gb driver limit of memory was eaten up.

Go into device manager, show hidden devices, and look inside "non plug and play devices". Try to stop and disable third party, non-Microsoft drivers one by one (especially for software products you don't use or aren't running at the moment) until the memory usage stops creeping up.

Ironically 64-bit drivers have to be quality tested to ensure this sort of thing doesn't happen.

For what Triscuit said, utilization of lots of memory is normal for Windows (why have 4gb of memory if you aren't going to USE it, hmm?) but when needed it should be freed. You may want to be sure you have a page file available as a back up plan.

When you say it "slowly drops to 40" are you referring to the "Free" section under "Physical memory" under the Performance tab in Task Manager? If so, what does "Cached" and "Available" say?

As mentioned, superfetch by design "uses" all the RAM it can, so your "Free" amount should eventually drop to 0 or very close to it. This shouldn't affect the performance of the computer negatively, however, so if the computer is sluggish, there may be a different underlying cause.

Did he disable his page file by any chance?

I don't think the page files are disabled, unless that is default in vista? Yes it is 64-bit. I can't check anything on it right now because he has it with him, I'm really just gathering information so the when I get a chance at it I can try some things. I did make sure to look at processes under all users.

I will check on the drivers possibility.

Page file is managed by the system by default, you'll see a file called C:\pagefile.sys if it is turned on.

Is he running sqlserver.exe? Usually programs like Quickbooks will install and run it on startup (even though it's not needed for client-side access). It's one of a number of programs that will just continue to consume as much memory as possible.

Also, under System, change the performance settings to Best Performance (instead of Best Appearence).

I'll have to check on those things as well, next time I have access to it.