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How do I find what’s eating up all of my system’s memory?

I have a machine with 4 GB of RAM and no swap because hard drive is incredibly slow and enabling it make computer nearly unusable.

I am running several processes and when I sum all memory eaten by all processes from Task Manager, it doesn't give more than 400MB of RAM (working set and private set). But still Task Manager says that 85% of memory is used, system is complaining that it's out of memory and applications are crashing as they run out of memory.

  • What uses the remaining 3.5 GB of RAM?
  • Is there a way to detect it?
  • Analyze the kernel, drivers, caches and everything to check what precisely uses this memory so that I could disable it to free some operating memory?

I checked show all processes and system is 64 bit.

I don't believe Windows 7 kernel requires 3.5 GB of RAM for it to work... Please note I am more a Unix guy, so I don't see much into Windows. But it doesn't make much sense to me that when processes are eating 400 MB, whole 4 GB RAM is being used and system is crashing.

In Linux you can type the command free to see how much memory you have, how much buffers are using and how much is "physically" used by applications. Is there something like that in Windows?

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Petr
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  • You have applications or services running in the background. – Ramhound Nov 02 '12 at 14:32
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    1. [Process Explorer](http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb896653.aspx) 2. [RAMMap](http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/ff700229.aspx) 3. [VMMap](http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/dd535533.aspx) – Oliver Salzburg Nov 02 '12 at 14:33
  • Win7 x32 or x64? Did you check "Show processes from all users" in Task Manager? – mtone Nov 02 '12 at 14:33
  • The SU Question [How do I find what's eating up all of my system's memory?](http://superuser.com/questions/437918/how-do-i-find-whats-eating-up-all-of-my-systems-memory) covers the exact same topic and has a lot of good answers, you may want to look there. – Scott Chamberlain Nov 02 '12 at 14:41
  • @OliverSalzburg I am surprised you did not close as duplicate, you are the accepted answer on the other question I linked. – Scott Chamberlain Nov 02 '12 at 14:43
  • @ScottChamberlain: Good catch! I knew this sounded familiar, but I was under tight time constraints ;) – Oliver Salzburg Nov 02 '12 at 15:11
  • I downloaded RAMMap, but despite it shows more than 1gb of zeroed memory, any application that requires more than 50mb of ram is terminated by system. Why? – Petr Nov 02 '12 at 15:13

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