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(At roughly 1656K of mem?) Just wondering if it's a virus.

Also, separate question: My memory usage for Win-7 64 is hovering at 1 GB. Nothing on but one instance of my IE browser. Is this a little high?

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    Beware of things like "winlogin.exe" though...
    – Hello71
    Jul 13, 2010 at 22:35

2 Answers 2

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The winlogon.exe process is a core windows process, and it should generally be running. Its memory usage seems fairly low (mine is usually about 3,200k).

As for the memory usage, even though you may only be running IE, the system itself is likely running a couple dozen various services. Some of them tend to be fairly high on the memory usage side, particularly the aggregate svchost.exe processes which can host multiple core windows services. Some of those may use around 200 megs or so of memory each, and there will likely be many other instances that use anywhere from 5-25 megs each. There are also a variety of other core windows services such as csrss, conhost, lsass, etc. that use a few megs each. Windows may also run a variety of other utility services, such as audiodg.exe, a variety of media player and/or media center services, etc.

You should also be aware of other non-application type processes that you may have running. These would include anti-virus and anti-malware programs that usually appear in the system notification area, and possibly other services that you may have installed (for example, DkService.exe is the background Diskeeper Service that defragments your drives if you have Diskeeper installed.)

It should also be noted that many services and applications in newer versions of windows tend to be rather "greedy" in their use of memory. They reserve more for their own use than they actually need, and only releasing unused quantities when the operating system requests it. Some processes may show they are using say 100 megs of memory, when in actuality they are using 30 out of a reserved 100. If other applications need memory, the OS will usually direct applications with higher reserve than usage to free up some of their reserve. If you have limited physical memory (i.e. 2Gb), starting up other processes besides IE should result in changes in memory usage for larger processes. If you have plenty of memory (i.e. 4Gb or more), greedy memory usage is fairly normal, and not something to worry about until it actually causes performance problems.

A base memory footprint of 1Gig is pretty normal for Windows Vista/7. This is largely a result of Microsoft moving services out of the windows kernel, and into distinct user-mode services. While your memory footprint does increase, the benefits of these kinds of changes tend to be more robustness, improved security, more modularity, etc. Greater use of memory by applications also leads to improved performance, as accessing data on disk is still orders of magnitude slower.

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Yes it is, winlogon.exe is a default Windows Process. 1656K of memory is a perfectly normal usage for winlogon.exe.

About the other question, it depends on other process that are running simultaneously.

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