Ram being eaten please help :)

My computer's RAM is being eaten for no apparent reason to me. Sometimes my computers ram usage will jump from around 20-30% to being full, and no programs will show up in the task manager showing which program is using all this ram, in the task manager itll only account for about 1.5 gigs of ram and i have 6 gigs. So up to 4.5 gigs is mysteriously being used and it wont show up in task manager. How can i find out whats actually eating it and then fix the darn thing?

yes i use vista 64. but it is causing problems because its getting to 96-100% ram usage which makes the computer slow down almost to a stop.

Are you certain the slowdown is related to the RAM? For instance, my rig with 6GB of RAM on Vista 64 currently has 5 MB free. Are your processors all idle while the computer is slow?

Since you can't see what program is using the RAM, then it looks like a memory leak in something... OK. Start with a full, good AV scan of some sort. It will either find something, or not... If not, then in your search bar type in memory and return. This will open up a memory diagnostics tool. Reboot, then patiently wait for the diags to finish. You'll get a report after the diags restart your PC. FF used to be a known culprit, as are several sidebar 'gadgets'. If still nothing, then I'll have to dig a bit deeper...

Why is there not a port of 'top' for x86?

Correct me if I'm wrong, but wouldn't a memory leak still have the memory assigned to the program that was leaking it?

That's the whole problem with a 'leak'... For instance, the FF leak I mentioned was using a constant amount of memory, but not correctly releasing the previously used memory. So total system memory usage crept up until the system BSOD'd.

There was an older version of BIND that did similar, and some versions of Oracle have had issues. Makes the offending program difficult to find.

Right so if it never correctly releases it, as far as the OS is concerned, it's still assigned to that program, no?

Well where does task manager get it's memory usage stats from? If, as far as the OS is concerned, the memory is still assigned to the program, it would report it there right?

My experience with the FF leak would show steadily increasing memory usage of the program, not phantom disappearing memory.

It looks at all processes running on your system and reports what their resource usage is. Process Monitor is especially useful in identifying the actual process behind generic services (like svchost), because you can drill down to see what program/driver is linked to that generic process. It also reports everything, and not just what's under your user name.

Basically, there are two potential issues: It's either hardware and software. Process monitor *will* show you what's going on with the software. - If a program has a memory leak, you will see it. Even if you get a null result, at that point you still learned that it's not a software issue.

This is a first step, free, and simple to perform.

And my experience with troubleshooting is that NOT performing the basic steps pretty much guarantees you won't solve anything, except by luck.