What's using all of my memory?

TubularLuggage

Recently I've been having problems with my laptop. Both the physical memory usage and CPU usage will spike to high levels and stay considerably high for no apparent reason, causing considerable slowdown. They'll both be consistently high, even when nothing is running (I'm the only user on this laptop, and it will do this pretty much from startup), and then every couple of minutes they'll spike, causing everything but the mouse to freeze for a few seconds. This has only started happening recently.

A virus scan turned up nothing. I've had this laptop for about 2 years, and these problems have only started recently. I'm running Vista (without any problems until now), and I have 2GB of memory, so that shouldn't be the problem. I ran a full disc error check, but the problem persists.
I haven't added any programs recently, and haven't used the laptop for anything I haven't done a million times before.

Any suggestions? All help will be appreciated.

Im_not_Nick

I'm having a similar problem. I am unable to even play flash games because of how choppy everything is. It's really frustrating as I haven't always had this problem. I've defragged, updated my drivers, emptied my harddrive some (96 of 231 GB), run virus software, and did a disk cleanup. I don't know what is sucking the CPU out of my poor lappy. It'll spike up usage and my games get super laggy. Help!

This is my system:

Toshiba Satellite
AMD Turion X2 Ultra Dual-Core Mobile ZM-80 2.10 GHz
4 GB Ram
64 bit Vista
231 GB HardDrive

fightinfilipino

next culprit would likely be spyware or malware which many AV software packages can miss.

try installing and running Malwarebytes Antimalware and/or Spybot. preferably both.
http://www.malwarebytes.org/
http://www.safer-networking.org/

also, try running a scan with HijackThis and post the log here.

TubularLuggage

Hmm, it seems to have resolved itself... for now.
I'll try those anti-spyware programs anyway, since one can never be too careful.

Æthelred

Am I stupid for saying use Task Manager to have a look..? Resource Monitor is pretty detailed now.

Mr. Buttons

Æthelred wrote: »

Am I stupid for saying use Task Manager to have a look..? Resource Monitor is pretty detailed now.

no, you're not. looking there may not be able to fix the problem, but should be able to give you an idea of where to start looking. CPU spikes and something called aesjdkl.exe claiming 100% of the cpu can give you a good idea of what the problem is, and same with seeing that firefox.exe is eating up 1gig of ram.

GrimReaper

Autoruns is very useful for analysing anything that's been set to start when your pc boots up. If you're not familiar with windows you can easily break stuff though.