Help - not sure what happened but windows seems to be hosed

[Carol Haynes]

Hi

Sorry not been around for ages - wonder if anyone has any ideas

Yesterday Windows got really slow, and ran out of system RAM (all 32Gb) and I have no idea why as I wasn't running anything unusual.

I tried to restart but it froze so I forced a restart and it got passed the usual Windows 7 start up screen but not to the desktop. I just ended up with a blank screen.

I have run CHKDSK and it comes up with no errors. I tried to start Windows in Safe Mode but it scrolls through the usual drivers, the hard disk is chuntering but it doesn't seem to go any further.

The problem is my system is dual booting Windows 10 and Windows 7 - when I try to boot from a windows 7 repair disk it says the wrong version of windows is installed.

Any ideas how to get in to repair the windows 7 installation? There is no 'Repair this computer" in the advanced startup screen for windows 7 in the dual boot menu.

I am currently seeing this from the Windows 10 installation. Files on the Windows 7 side appear to be fine

[Carol Haynes]

OK Seem to have got Windows 7 up again.

No idea how - I did another CHKDSK from Windows 10 and no errors showed up. I ran an SFC check on the Windows 7 installation from Windows 10 (using OFFBOOT options) and no errors showed up.

Restarted and it started as normal.

Having said that I have 32Gb of RAM installed and it is currently using around 25% of it - all I am doing is browsing and running a virus scan (neither of which have increased RAM usage more than 2%)

The two largest processes are instances svchost.exe (553Mb and 240Mb) - which looks like a lot to me. I checked Windows update and there are no updates pending or happening in the background.

Anyone any idea how to figure out where 8Gb RAM is going?

I ran a full Malwarebytes scan (no detections) and am running a full virus scan - so far nothing.

I am usually quite good at figuring out this sort of stuff but this has me confused.

[wraith808]

Process Explorer might help.

[Carol Haynes]

That's what I thought - but it doesn't seem to want to want to reveal much about what the svchost processes are up to

[tomos]

Does it not show what's using the rest of the 8GB ram being used?

You presumably know this: mouseover &/or press Enter on (e.g.) the svchost will give more info

[Carol Haynes]

These are the panels that have info:




I have lost the plot  - what comes of messing with this to 430am 

[wraith808]

So, it looks like it's superfetch, and using at the peak 800MB, but currently almost 600 MB.  I've had problems with SuperFetch before on another system, and just disabled it.

It has an entry in the services control panel.  Just go to that entry and disable it.  It doesn't affect anything, so you can try this without worries.

More information:

https://superuser.com/questions/645650/what-is-superfetch-and-its-relation-to-svchost-exe-localsystemnetworkrestricte

[cranioscopical]

Also, could it possibly be this?

Users of Malwarebytes, a popular security solution for Windows, reported on Saturday that the software's RAM usage and CPU utilization was going through the roof.

One user published a screenshot that showed the Malwarebytes Service process using more than 19 Gigabytes of RAM, and others soon chimed in and revealed that Malwarebytes used a lot of RAM and CPU on their devices as well.

It took down my machine, ate up ALL the memory, and required a restore-from-backup solution.

[Carol Haynes]

Thanks I will give them a go and see what happens - I disabled superfecth and stopped MBAM loading at startup.

[mouser]

Yikes!
Yeah martin at ghacks reports on the malware bytes issue: https://www.ghacks.net/2018/01/28/borked-malwarebytes-update-causes-high-ram-usage/

[IainB]

@mouser:

Yikes!
Yeah martin at ghacks reports on the malware bytes issue: https://www.ghacks.net/2018/01/28/borked-malwarebytes-update-causes-high-ram-usage/

Classic. Very droll. Yeah. like nobody could have predicted that... 

[Carol Haynes]

Thanks all - things seem to be running relatively sensibly again now.