In the last few days my Win 7 computer started getting slow after sitting for a few hours, even if it was just idling with several browser windows open, and towards the end of the day it becomes pretty much non responsive. Looks to be a RAM utilization problem where the memory is not cleared after a program shuts down. The only recent thing I did that could have possibly caused any changes to the system are a few automatic windows updates, a Java update, an Adobe Acrobat Reader update, and uninstalling some junk software that piled up such as search bars etc. Any ideas how to diagnose and with this? Ill post up some screenshots from the System Monitor in about 15 minutes after my photoshop loads up

[Edited on February 16, 2012 at 10:15 PM. Reason : se7en]

2/16/2012 10:13:14 PM

2/16/2012 10:39:19 PM

Go to the Resource monitor, memory tab, sort descending by Commit, and post as much of that window as possible.

2/17/2012 6:41:35 AM

backup files, nuke it, reload, fixed.

2/17/2012 8:51:20 AM

in the resources tab under memory it has a very nice physical memory display. green is shit thats actually in use, blue is standby, light blue is free. the standby stuff is stuff that windows has cached cause it thinks you may want to use it in the future. if something else needs that ram the standby stuff will get dumped. So green is really all you want to care about.

the other thing to check is the disk tab. in the storage section it lists all the physical drives and some stats. the disk queue is the number of i/o requests queued to be handled by the disk. normally when your computer is loafing this should be near 0. if its not, then someting is using it and/or the disk cant keep up with basic i/o (most likely cause its bad).

You can see whats using the disk in the two disk activity sections. sort by total i/o and if you see something going nuts then you know what your problem is. if its a user process kill it and see if the disk queue goes back to normal and the computer becomes usable again. if its a system process you may need to do some digging with something like process explorer to figure out what exactly its doing.

2/17/2012 9:55:08 AM

Thanks guys! Memory tab of the resourese monitor inded showed that WDFMD.exe took up over 14 gigs of RAM (although it did not show up in either applications, processes, or services tab of the Task Manager). It looks to be the indexing service for the automatic backup software that came with my WD Passport external hard drive. Google says lots of other people are pissed about the same issue: http://community.wdc.com/t5/WD-Smartware/WDFME-exe-RAM-hog/td-p/250634/page/13
i switched the backups to manual mode for now and will see if anyone found the solution.

Disk activity section looked good, but I have been thinking about getting a SSD and moving just my system files there because my system disk does seem to be the bottleneck in some other cases under load. How hard is it to do it without a clean reinstall and what is the best way to go about it? Probably 75% of the system disk right now is photos, music, and docs.

2/17/2012 12:18:08 PM