Windows 7 Lag and Memory Usage

[Purple Materia]

Hello everyone. Lately, I've been having some problems with my machine. Suddenly, my machine was plagued with lag. Nothing extremely heavy, but it was significantly slower and laggier than normal. Firefox hung, MSN freezes from time to time, and everything was just a mess. I'm having problems multi-tasking things that I could've done a week ago with relative ease. My RAM usage has shot up. Normal RAM usage jumped to about 1.23GB out of 2GB when I had Firefox 4 and Winamp open, when it used to be far less than that. Svchost has gone up too. I thought either my HDD or RAM were failing, so I ran a check on both and it came out fine. Scanned with Malwarebytes, NOD32, and Windows Defender in Safe Mode and found no infections. Pretty much, I haven't found any signs that could lead to the jump. So, what do you guys think? Here's my system specs: Core 2 Duo CPU E6550 @ 2.33GHz 2GB DDR3 Memory Maxtor 6L300R0 (150GB) WDC WD 1600AAJS-60PSA0 (250GB) Intel 82945G MS-7267 Windows 7 Ultimate

 

[Zet]

I'm guessing Windows 7 Ultimate would be the problem.

 

[Purple Materia]

I'm guessing Windows 7 Ultimate would be the problem.

It isn't. I've been running 7 Ultimate for a month now with no problems, up until now.

 

[Archer]

Do you get the same problems if you start in Safe Mode?

 

[donavannj]

Firefox 4 seems to have some lag issues where it'll lock up for some time, from personal experience after installing it. I'd try answering Archer's question first, though, before we pin it on FF4.

 

[Archer]

Firefox 4 seems to have some lag issues where it'll lock up for some time, from personal experience after installing it. I'd try answering Archer's question first, though, before we pin it on FF4.

Firefox is a pig at the best of times, so it may just be highlighting the lag.

Also, in Task Manager, there's a button on the "Performance" tab called Performance Monitor. It's like Task Manager on steroids, so it will tell you which processes are hogging everything and moreover the sub-threads of rundll32 and svhost, etc.

 

[Purple Materia]

Do you get the same problems if you start in Safe Mode?

I'll restart now.

Firefox is a pig at the best of times, so it may just be highlighting the lag.

I've noticed; I've uninstalled it, and instead installed 3.6.16. It fixed it a little bit. Memory usage is still unusually high - 150MB, including the plugin-container. RuneScape was exceptionally high, at 350MB today in Java! Skype is also unusually high, at 100MB+. MSN's around 40MB, too. Firefox has stabled a bit (50MB) though, so that's good.

I'll try Safe Mode, and come back.

 

[Archer]

I'll restart now.



I've noticed; I've uninstalled it, and instead installed 3.6.16. It fixed it a little bit. Memory usage is still unusually high - 150MB, including the plugin-container. RuneScape was exceptionally high, at 350MB today in Java! Skype is also unusually high, at 100MB+. MSN's around 40MB, too. Firefox has stabled a bit (50MB) though, so that's good.

I'll try Safe Mode, and come back.

If you get 50MB of ram usage in Firefox, that's really impressive. It idles at 150MB for me on a single empty tab with FF4. Open the index pages of 5 sites with no flash and it hits 300MB. Which is fairly good for it, anyway.

RAM usage in itself is not an issue, but when things begin to lag, yeah, you need to work out what's causing it. Did you try Resource Monitor?

 

[Zet]

It isn't. I've been running 7 Ultimate for a month now with no problems, up until now.

It will run fine at first but after a while you will see slow performance, especially in laptops.

 

[Dawn]

Firefox is and has been an obese, obese browser and Firefox 4 probably has bugs to be worked out, as it's kind of a new major release. I highly recommend trying Chrome to see if that helps.

Oh, and 2 GB RAM and a core 2 Duo are now "old standard". Y'know, that time and place where they've slipped into the low tier end of the spectrum and everyone starts fanboying over them as part of their denial. (See: "Still useful!11!") <.<

So yeah, consider that your CPU and RAM could both be a lot better and that you're using the most bloated browser around. Try and fix one of the two. If that still doesn't work, consider finding alternatives for the programs you use everyday, and see if that changes anything. Finally, if THAT doesn't work, I honestly don't know what else to say. unless you can give me some more details on what you've been doing lately around the time this happened.

Edit: Resource Monitor sounds like a quicker way to find what's causing the problem if you know what you're doing.

 

[EJ]

^What she said.

Try out Chrome. I never have any problems with Chrome slowing me down. I hated Firefox for always crashing on me and being a resource hog.

Also, windows 7 isn't the problem. Unlike Vista, it is a very reliable OS and essentially "Vista done right."

 

[Zet]

Firefox is and has been an obese, obese browser and Firefox 4 probably has bugs to be worked out, as it's kind of a new major release. I highly recommend trying Chrome to see if that helps.

Oh, and 2 GB RAM and a core 2 Duo are now "old standard". Y'know, that time and place where they've slipped into the low tier end of the spectrum and everyone starts fanboying over them as part of their denial. (See: "Still useful!11!") <.<

So yeah, consider that your CPU and RAM could both be a lot better and that you're using the most bloated browser around. Try and fix one of the two. If that still doesn't work, consider finding alternatives for the programs you use everyday, and see if that changes anything. Finally, if THAT doesn't work, I honestly don't know what else to say. unless you can give me some more details on what you've been doing lately around the time this happened.

Edit: Resource Monitor sounds like a quicker way to find what's causing the problem if you know what you're doing.

Firefox 4 is bug free, it's why Mozilla kept pushing back the release date.

^What she said.

Try out Chrome. I never have any problems with Chrome slowing me down. I hated Firefox for always crashing on me and being a resource hog.

Also, windows 7 isn't the problem. Unlike Vista, it is a very reliable OS and essentially "Vista done right."

Chrome will create a bazillion processes for every tab you have open, it's constantly working in the background so you don't even notice that it's updating. And Google gets all your browsing data so I would say Chrome is a pretty unreliable browser. And you don't even know the difference between each Windows OS editions, Ultimate edition(both Vista and 7) requires a high-end machine.

 

[Purple Materia]

And you don't even know the difference between each Windows OS editions, Ultimate edition(both Vista and 7) requires a high-end machine.

Huh. I always thought the differences were just the features.

 

[Archer]

Huh. I always thought the differences were just the features.

Pretty much. There's next to no components in Ultimate that run all of the time. Those that do can be turned off, regardless.

The problem here is unlikely to be the OS, at least not the version of it. Did you check Resource Monitor or Safe Mode?

Your hardware isn't top-of-the-line, but it should certainly cope with general usage just fine.

 

[Dawn]

Firefox 4 is bug free, it's why Mozilla kept pushing back the release date.

This is called troubleshooting, and it's completely valid. Something also seems wrong about discussing Firefox 4's bugginess in a help thread. ... Or how good Chrome is. Kindly let us continue if you aren't going to help?

I'm... also eagerly awaiting the results of a browser switch.

 

[Bloo]

The best thing to do for now would be either to downgrade (which you have already done) or switch to Google Chrome. If you type "about:memory" into the address bar of Google Chrome, you can see your memory usage. n__n It will also show the usage in comparison to other browsers if they're open as well, so you can see which one would be more suitable for you.

If you're looking to change the overall performance of your system, there is a very good program that came across called RegClean that deletes cache files, cookies, everything in the Recycle Bin, and cleans your registry so that your computer can be faster.

 

[Morgnarok]

I agree, I use google chrome and have found it is the fastest browser out of internet explorer and firefox.

 

[SpeedyGeek]

I'd personally go through msconfig, get rid of all the unnecessary junk that you don't need, and then kill the ones you don't need.

Also, try disabling all the real-time scans and whatnot on your antivirus -- that could be the culprit as well.

But all that aside, you should really consider bumping up the RAM to 3 or 4 GB. That would help out a lot.

 

[Morgnarok]

I run windows 7 on 2gb ram no lag at all. As long as you got 2gb ram you should be fine running windows 7 depending on your other pc specs.

 

[jonicito]

I have windows 7 x64 and 2gb ram, my only problem is 2 weeks ago, the days prior to my first IE9, the interent explorer was fine and no memory leaks when I put music long on youtube, but when I installed IE9, the memory leaks more and after 20 minutes, the youtube video shows a grey dow with a white exclimation mark, scrolling up and down flickers, and sometimes the textures flickers too. When I downgraded to IE8, it still has same problems as IE9 do.