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I have a Windows 7 laptop, which has 4GB of RAM and admittedly is quite a few years old. Recently, it seems all my RAM is being used up, without doing anything or very much at all (e.g. just opening Google Chrome and reading my Goggle Mail), and everything grinds to a halt if I try to do anything at all (e.g. open a PDF document in Acrobat Reader, open Word or Excel, etc...).

Below are a couple of screenshots from Process Explorer that illustrate the issue:

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I have changed the indexing options of Windows to a minimum set of folders to see if that makes a difference. I suppose I could disable search indexing altogether. Any other suggestions (other than buying more RAM)?

Update: my question is different from the suggested duplicate. I have tried stopping some services, but I don't really know which are needed, and which ones aren't. Below is a screenshot of RAMMap, it shows that most of the memory is active (mostly as "nonpaged pool" and "process private"), and not in standby as in the suggested duplicate question:

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am304
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  • Stop and set startup type disabled of those unwanted services. You have more background process, also try to disable them. – Biswapriyo Sep 12 '17 at 15:10
  • @Biswa Thanks for the suggestion. How do I go about disabling services/processes, and also how do I figure out which services are needed or not? – am304 Sep 12 '17 at 15:15
  • @Biswa what I mean is: there are probably some services that are needed by Windows to function correctly, I don't want to accidentally turn those off and make the problem worse. Also is there to determine which service belong to which software? – am304 Sep 12 '17 at 19:25
  • @MustafaAKTAŞ I have edited my question and explained why it is different from the suggested duplicate. – am304 Sep 12 '17 at 19:44
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    The problem is the high Non paged pool which at about 1.6 GB is huge. This is typically caused by a driver problem. Disabling services probably won't help much. – LMiller7 Sep 12 '17 at 20:09
  • @LMiller7 Thanks for the tip, any suggestion on how to track down the culprit driver? I should probably also have said that I very rarely turn my laptop off, it stays on for days/weeks at a time. Restarting it seems to temporarily restore the memory usage to reasonable levels, but as soon as I start using it, it climbs again very quickly. – am304 Sep 12 '17 at 20:40
  • [I've already posted an in detail answer](https://superuser.com/a/674725/174557) on how to do this – magicandre1981 Sep 13 '17 at 12:21

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Based on the RamMap image, it seems that the culprit is a leaking driver, because of the high value of nonpaged pool (about 1.7 GB).

As the creator of RamMap explains nonpaged pool is used only by the kernel and drivers, and 1.7 GB is way to much for that, and even more if it's a 32 bit Windows (I just checked a Win10 64 bit on a machine with 6GB of RAM and the nonpaged pool is about 400MB).

If you updated a driver recently (maybe graphics drivers?) that could be a good starting point, if not you should check if there is updated drivers for that computer.

Alberto Martinez
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  • Thanks. In the end, I wiped out the hard drive and reinstalled Windows + drivers from scratch. It wasn't easy as a lot of drivers were missing and Windows couldn't find them through Windows Update, but I got there in the end. I also fitted an extra 4GB of RAM, which helped :-) – am304 Nov 02 '18 at 15:09