Sudden unexplained loss of laptop memory

Chrono Helix

Task Manager

CPU Usage: fluctuating, but generally below 10%
Memory Usage: hovering around 700MBish (my laptop only has 1GB RAM)

Physical Memory (MB)
Total 1013
Cached 450
Free 11

Kernel Memory (MB)
Total 126
Paged 83
Nonpaged 42

System
Handles ~24000
Threads ~990
Processes 80
Page File 1238M/1278M

System Information

Installed Physical Memory (RAM) 1.00GB
Total Physical Memory 0.99GB
Available Physical Memory 247MB
Total Virtual Memory 1.25GB
Available Virtual Memory 34.0MB
Page File Size 307MB

I'm running Windows Vista. I have no idea what's hogging so much memory, the processes tab in Task Manager doesn't show a lot of resources being consumed.
I don't have a previous restore point to use System Restore with.
I don't click on suspicious links and I'm running Firefox with NoScript and whitelist quite strictly, so I probably don't have a virus or spyware or something (I may be wrong about that though). Any ideas on what could be the problem, and more importantly, what I can do to solve it?

Djeet

Download Process Explorer here to find out what's taking up memory.

Also upgrade to 2 GB RAM. Running Vista on 1GB is like running XP on 256MB: it's possible, but it totally blows a goat ass.

theclam

Vista grabs as much memory as it can to cache stuff. As long as your hard drive isn't being accessed, it doesn't matter how much RAM is being used.

That being said, I'd upgrade. Memory is super cheap.

Chrono Helix

I did consider the idea of upgrading RAM, but my friend pointed out the possibility that it may be a virus or something and the same thing might happen again. I'll try out Process Explorer first.

EDIT: I've tried it, and I can't identify anything that's taking up more than it should.

proXimity

That's pretty normal for Vista, only thing to do about it is throw more RAM at it, which isn't horrible as it's damn cheap these days.

Chrono Helix

The strange thing is, this problem only appeared yesterday, and I've been using this laptop for nearly 2 years.
I also just noticed the clock at the bottom right of the screen doesn't seem to update at the correct speed.

theclam

Clock changing is sometimes a hardware issue (e.g. the battery for your BIOS is dying and needs to be changed out), sometimes a software issue (spyware).

It couldn't hurt to run a scan with MBAM (the free version).

Chrono Helix

I did a full scan with MBAM and no malware was detected.

exoplasm

Keep in mind that memory usage readings in Windows are not super accurate if you don't know what to look for. Consider that by default task manager won't show you how much memory is actually being used by a program. There are many types of memory a program can use:



I'm using Windows 7, but I think Vista has this same thing:



Click that to see this:



The standby is the prefetch stuff I think.

Chrono Helix

The data shown in the Resource Monitor in Vista is a little different, it doesn't have that 5-segment graph, all it does is show all the processes that are currently running, as well as
PID
Hard Faults/min
Commit(KB)
Working Set(KB)
Shareable(KB)
Private(KB)

There doesn't seem to be an option to add columns to track other stuff. The processes shown seem to correspond with everything picked up by Process Explorer.

EDIT: I think I just saw the clock go from 10-ish pm to 9-ish pm. Talk about weird...