before when doing normal tasks (such as surfing the web and using msn), my comp would use around 1.4gb of ram. but nowadays, its been slowly climbing and climbing, and it uses almost 2gb now! the fan seems to run high for menial tasks, and things seem a bit more sluggish. i haven't made any major software/hardware changes recently, and i'm pretty sure it isn't a virus (though it might be), and i checked task manager, and there doesn't appear to be anything in particular that's whoring out the ram. restarting the computer sets it back to usual for a bit, but then it climbs back up later. any thoughts? thanks in advance.

 

Open up the task manager (ctrl+alt+del) and check your processes. You can order the processes by the amount of RAM they are using. See which ones are using up your resources the most. The program is usually identifiable by the name, but if not, a simple google search will show you what's hogging the RAM.

 

You know how to schedule the boot-time scan, yeah? Open the avast main window, click the little eject-looking button, click Schedule Boot-Time Scan, and hit Schedule. Bam. Reboot your computer and let it go. Don't do what my brother did and forget to plug in your computer if it's a laptop. I'm kinda glad Dell gave him a Recovery partition.

 

It's a so called "feature" of Vista. If you have alot (3GB or more), it copies data to the ram for faster access. This feature also puts less stress on your harddrive. I didn't like it either but I've gotten used to it. I have 4GB and my PC is using 2.4GB of it.

 

Yeah, he lost power. Stupid bastard didn't realize his power bar wasn't switched on.

And your system is x64? Damn... well, running a deep system scan (high sensitivity, scan in archive files too) will spot out most of the viruses.

 

da_head, how large is your laptop's pagefile? Bump that baby up to 6-10 gigs or so. Maybe that'll help.

 

Nah, 8 gigs should be plenty. Hm... well, just get back to me on how long it takes before your laptop slows to a crawl and we'll figure something out from there.

Another thought, what CPU does your laptop have?

 

yep that's correct. currently its using 2.11 gb of ram, and things get a bit choppy sumtimes (like typing this for instance) and i've noticed when streaming videos the video freezes every 20 secs or so for an instant.

 

Looks like a reboot is all you need. However, that could get annoying to do all the time.

As a plus, I'm using Windows 7 and my laptop is using less than a gig of RAM. I currently have open a download accelerator, Firefox, Windows Media Player, Ares (a smaller version of Limewire), Windows Live Mail, AND Windows Live Messenger, along with my antivirus. I love Windows 7!

 

For me, it's always this damn svchost.exe that uses up the most RAM, up to 150k. You might be in a similar situation, but you can't disable it.
The other thing is Firefox. Sometimes I open up so many tabs and that increasingly takes up a lot of RAM too.