Why is all my RAM being used by Aero?

Question

I have a new Acer laptop. Specs are Windows 7 Ultimate (x86), 2GB RAM, Core i5 480M, HD6550 gfx (1GB dedicated memory) card and 600GB HDD.

Whenever I turn on the laptop, the computer is extremely slow and prone to crashing. I checked Task Manager and it seems that despite having no programs running, the RAM is 98% utilised.

The odd thing is the processes listed do not account for the RAM which is used up. I did a memcheck on the RAM and no errors were found.

If I disable Aero then the RAM goes back down to a normal 25%. Any ideas? I like Aero, would suck if I can't use it.

Answer 1

actually you can click on the 'Show processes from all users' at the bottom left corner of the task manager to see a clearer picture. it seems to be a system process eating up the ram. you can also try using the Process Explorer tool from Sysinternals.

Answer 2

Usually Aero effects are done by the GPU. Is your video card properly installed and configured?

Answer 3

If you are getting blue screen crashes, use this utility to read the dump files if there are any, might give a clue to what is causing the crashes.

http://www.nirsoft.net/utils/blue_screen_view.html

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Update your video driver to the latest version.

Answer 4

If you don't want your RAM to be used, take it out of the machine and put it on the shelf. It's not like if you use only half your RAM today, you can use twice as much tomorrow. Unused RAM is wasted RAM.

Focus on your actual problem, whatever it is. RAM being used is a good thing -- that's what it's for. The reason you add lots of RAM to a machine is so that the machine can use it. RAM that's not used is no better than RAM that's not there.

If your machine was using less RAM, it would perform worse since it would need to load more information from slower sources like the hard drive.