CPU and Memory overload

[Zippy the Wonderslug]

Hey all.

I'm constantly getting this:

Along with this as well.

That's not even the best screenshots I can provide.

The memory usage usually tops out around 1.44 Gigs.

I don't get it.

I've rebooted and even shut down this Windows 7 computer.

I installed Microsoft Essentials tonight and it didn't find a single thing wrong.

The only thing I can think of is that I started a sketch on a drawing website.

I got a pop up stating that Adobe wanted to use a meg of memory on the computer, and I accepted.

I kept drawing but received another message stating in now wanted 10 megs.

It finally got to the point where I allowed it unlimited memory.

I don't believe I've done anything else to cause such troubles.

Any advice?

This computer is super chunky now, and because of the memory usage and CPU load, I can't copy and paste something anymore in a note file, even after rebooting.

I'm not allowed to reformat since the computer is not my own.

Please help me.

 

[Zippy the Wonderslug]

Sorry, I forgot to mention one other thing I did.

I copied 24,000 points of data in a Google Spreadsheet, but I used Firefox at the time.

This computer hated me for that, timed out, and eventually froze.

But still, I rebooted, shut down, tried using Google Chrome instead since then, so I don't get why the high load of CPU and memory.

I do have Google Drive by the way.

Again, it's not my computer so I would love to resolve this issue.

Cheers.

 

[paul1149]

Try to narrow it down. It is Chrome specific? Browser specific? In Chrome right click the title bar and open Task Manager to see what's going on there. Chrome also has a setting to allow plugins to run even when Chrome isn't open. I would disallow that.

You can also try Safe Mode with Networking. If that is ok there might be something under MSCONFIG / Startup that needs to be disabled.

 

[Sketcher]

Go to Control Panel > System and show us what it says for Processor, Installed memory (RAM) and System type.

 

[Zippy the Wonderslug]

It's not Firefox or Chrome being the cause since I have both of them closed.

I'm trying right now to either save a file, which it won't even bring up the "Save File As" window option, or copy and paste the contents into a Notepad file or something but I get a pop up error stating, "Not enough memory to perform desired operation".

The amount of data I'm trying to copy is 1,671,684 bytes and the program I'm currently using is called Hex Workshop.

It's worked many times before and I don't have a clue what might have changed since then or why it's chewing up 1.5 gigs of memory when it's not running any weird operations that I can close down in the Task Manager.

Thanks for the help Sketcher and Paul.

 

[paul1149]

With the browsers closed, what is eating up cpu and memory at task manager / processes? If it's a svchost, you can right-click it and choose "go to services".

 

[Sketcher]

Thank you for the screenshot and the additional information.

The problem is that you are running a single-core processor. This is like going to get your driver's license renewed with only one teller open. Just as every person needs to wait their turn, every process needs to wait its turn before the CPU can process it. As software gets more demanding, this limitation becomes more pronounced. A dual or quad core processor will allocate requests among its available cores to allow much more to get done simultaneously. This should translate into your browser working much more quickly. Back in the day when I upgraded my Athlon64 to an Athlon64 X2, I noticed a night-and-day difference. This has also been the case recently when running various operating systems in virtual machines. When I allocate one core, they are universally slow. When I allocate two cores, they quickly do everything I want them to do. I do not run Hex Workshop, so I do not know how demanding it is, or if it can be pushed to eat up gobs of resources like Photoshop or Maya can. You may want to look into that as long as you are upgrading hardware. It may simply be a matter of newer apps that you are running and have upgraded. Their increased needs tend to sneak up on people.

 

[Qyöt27]

The screenshot of the Task Manager tells us nothing, though - you have it set to order by CPU usage, but you're complaining about memory, and the Task Manager window is only showing maybe 1/4 of the running processes since you need to scroll down (or vertically extend the window) to see the other 3/4. Being short on memory can put an undue burden on the CPU, resulting in everything getting sluggish.

I'm going to echo the idea that things could be running automatically on startup or in the background that cause this. Chrome does shadow updating, for one, and most anti-malware software that does active protection can also cause a drag on resources.

I've witnessed the same kind of disparity personally - it's kind of sad that a setup running a Coppermine-based Celeron with 512MBs of PC-133 SDRAM is far more responsive than one running an Athlon64 Orleans with 2GBs of DDR2-800 SDRAM. And the thing that drags the Athlon64 computer down are those startup applications (notoriously, AVG, although Chrome and Skype are also there), since the same computer booted into its Lubuntu partition performs with a proper amount of responsiveness (although the onboard video totally sucks).

The setup with the Celeron doesn't have those burdens because I actually know what I'm doing in regards to system security and maintenance. I'm not lying when I say it's more responsive, and that's regardless of accounting for the fact that it's 5 years older and at a lower price tier than the Athlon64. The only time the Athlon64 actually performs better (under Windows) is when it can take advantage of its wider amount of available SIMD instruction sets...like when encoding video.

 

[ForJesusChrist]

How much RAM do you have? You may need to get more RAM. Anything 8+ gigabyte is good .

 

[Sketcher]

How much RAM do you have? You may need to get more RAM. Anything 8+ gigabyte is good .

A good general suggestion, but the screenshots do not show the RAM being exhausted. The CPU however, is at 100% use. If the motherboard is going to be upgraded with the CPU, then get more RAM too. Why not.

 

[Christian Networking]

I'd really rather do this myself remotely, but

Click start
type in the box msconfig
press enter

Go into services

Hide Microsoft services
Disable anything else that does not look necessary
Click Apply
Do the same thing in the start up tab.
Click OK

Yes to reboot

Caution is advised,

Rick