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I am having intermittent issues with my gaming computer. Sometimes, while playing Battlefield 3 (only 2 times the problem has occured), my memory usage goes to 100% of my 16GB machine. I close down BF3 (which is unplayable at this point), open up task manager, and no process uses more than 25MB of memory. Process Explorer shows much the same thing.

The problem disappears aftera reboot.

Any ideas what can be going on here?

Task manager Process explorer Poolmon x86 Poolmon x64

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You may have a bad driver which leaks pool memory. Start the TasmkMgr and look at the non paged pool usage value. If this is several GB, you need to do the following:

Install the Windows Driver Kit, run poolmon.exe and look which pooltag causes the high memory usage. If you found the tag, open the cmd prompt and run 

findstr /s <Pooltag> *.sys

and look which driver is shown. If it happens while playing games, update the GPU driver. The ATI 12.10 driver is known to cause it. Install the 13.1 WHQL driver to fix it.

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  • I do have the 12.10 ATI driver installed. Upgrading now, hope the problem disappears.
    – Vegard Larsen
    Jan 14, 2013 at 17:48
  • 12.11 beta drivers crash whenever BF3 is started, unfortunately, so rolling back.
    – Vegard Larsen
    Jan 16, 2013 at 17:31
  • run poolmon and look if the AMD driver is really the cause.
    – magicandre1981
    Jan 16, 2013 at 19:10
  • poolmon output added. Seems like MINI is the culprit. Potential matches: arc.sys, atikmdag.sys, crashdmp.sys, diskdump.sys. I am assuming atikmdag.sys is the issue, so I am trying another upgrade of the ATI driver.
    – Vegard Larsen
    Jan 19, 2013 at 9:18
  • ok, this can be the AMD driver. AMD releaed the 13.1 WHQL driver. Try this one.
    – magicandre1981
    Jan 19, 2013 at 11:33

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