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Windows 8.1 64bit runs on Asus laptop with 8Gb of RAM and NVidia chip. McAffee antivirus was installed from the very begging. All drivers are up to date. Recently I start getting low on memory error.

According to the task manager, at that time, 98% RAM was consumed, McAffee consumed the most of RAM - 200 Mb and according to the task manager, 200 Mb was 25% out of the total memory!!!

The question: Who has consumed the rest 7.2 Gb of RAM ? I suspect that maybe some drivers, like in this case: Getting 'running low on memory errors' on Windows 7 64-bit with 8GB RAM.

But I do not like an idea to spend a week of reverting every single driver. Is there a way to find the cause of this problem??? Maybe some external tool could help?

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Dime
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    [Process Explorer](http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb896653.aspx) can help locate which process is using your memory. We will need more information. Does this problem happen when you use a minimal start-up configuration? – Ramhound Apr 30 '14 at 11:56
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    In addition to what @Ramhound suggested, [RAMMap](http://technet.microsoft.com/en-au/sysinternals/ff700229.aspx) can be useful in determining what that memory is used as, and can help expose non-process memory usage (e.g. drivers, cache). – Bob Apr 30 '14 at 12:10
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    looks like you have a driver issue. Check this: http://superuser.com/a/674725/174557 – magicandre1981 Apr 30 '14 at 18:29

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As Ramhound suggests, Process Explorer will give a decent picture of what is running and what is consuming your memory.

Bear in mind that you might have some dodgy software that is causing a memory leak (using up memory and not releasing it cleanly to be reused by other processes). For example, I recently had a memory leak while running a game... when changing maps on BF4, there was a 50-75% chance that a memory leak would start... over the next few minutes, my memory utilization would gradually ramp up to 92-98% and a reboot was required.

This article might help you identify if there is a memory leak, and what processes are responsible.

CJM
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  • Interesting. A memory leak that is not resolved by closing the offending process (i.e. a system memory leak rather than a process one) is particularly nasty. It's typically caused by either a bug in the OS itself, or one of its drivers (graphics drivers are a particularly big offender in this respect). – Bob Apr 30 '14 at 12:12
  • In this case, it was a problem with a certain range of ATI cards (Radeon HD5xxx-HD7xxx ranges)... AMD were adamant that the problem was with the game (or possibly OpenGL/DirectX/etc), but it was clearly with something low-level. Having upgraded my gfx card, I thankfully no longer have the problem, but it was never actually resolved. – CJM Apr 30 '14 at 13:40