computer trouble/excessive RAM usage and crashing

[Kitah]

Just wondering if anyone has any idea what may be going on with my laptop. The laptop is a few months old, a Dell XPS 15, 8gb Ddr3 RAM, 64bit windows 8 OS (which I hate, I wish I could switch to 7 again), intel i7-3612QM processor... When using very minimal programs the computer frequently gets exceedingly slower until a warning pops up stating my memory is running low and to close programs. If i close everything it progresses and gives me another warning before the computer just freezes.

When opening the task manager, on startup and on just 'mmaintenence' without programs running, a 'service host: local system (12) ' uses 2.5gb of ram. This seems exceedingly high!

Any idea what is going on and how to fix it?? And where i could purchase windows 7 that isnt exceedingly expensive? (I kinda begrudge paying a lot to buy an older version of windows because the new one is poo... )

Thanks =D

 

[JackTheHerper]

That's weird... unsure why you're computer would do that.
But for windows 7, Dick Smith or Ebay should be cheap.

 

[jedi_339]

Just wondering if anyone has any idea what may be going on with my laptop. The laptop is a few months old, a Dell XPS 15, 8gb Ddr3 RAM, 64bit windows 8 OS (which I hate, I wish I could switch to 7 again), intel i7-3612QM processor... When using very minimal programs the computer frequently gets exceedingly slower until a warning pops up stating my memory is running low and to close programs. If i close everything it progresses and gives me another warning before the computer just freezes.

When opening the task manager, on startup and on just 'mmaintenence' without programs running, a 'service host: local system (12) ' uses 2.5gb of ram. This seems exceedingly high!

Any idea what is going on and how to fix it?? And where i could purchase windows 7 that isnt exceedingly expensive? (I kinda begrudge paying a lot to buy an older version of windows because the new one is ****... )

Thanks =D

Too much naughty adult related content me thinks kitah
Who'd have known with such an innocent avatar!

But in all seriousness that's not normal and you've probably got a Trojan or virus on the computer, you need to scan it with some good virus scans and perhaps more then one to make sure you get rid of the problem. You could try anti malware bytes, I think that is free, and I have esetfree anti virus on my computer which seems to work alright

 

[Ambush]

i be taking it back under warranty

 

[Marzzy]

Problem : It's a dell...

Done a quick google seems to be a common problem with windows 8.

Try this:

Click the lower left corner to open the Start screen.

Type Schedule tasks in the Start screen

Click Settings

Click Schedule tasks

Go to Task Scheduler Library\Microsoft\Windows\TaskScheduler

Right Click Regular Maintenance

Click Properties

Click the Settings tab

Put a check in the box to Allow task to be run on demand

Click OK

Right Click Regular Maintenance again

This time, click Run

Right Click Regular Maintenance a third time

And this time, click End

After this see if there's any Microsoft updates Start > Windows Updates


Let me know how you go

 

[Kitah]

Windows did recently do an upgrade ( i.e. 2days ago) and it significantly worsened the problem..

 

[Tobe404]

What Antivirus/AntiSpyware/Security software do you have on your laptop? Could be related to that.
My brother recently upgraded to WIndows 8 (on a HP All In One Desktop) and hasn't had any issues.
I'm with you though. I'll never upgrade to Windows 8. (Especially since I made my own Custom Windows 7 image)
You do know you can switch back to the Windows 7 interface though right (if the main annoyance is the interface that is)?

 

[dangles]

Download hijackthis run it then post the log. If you have a virus loading on start this normally shows it

 

[Ambush]

a lot of bad advice. it's sounding like faulty ram

 

[Tobe404]

If it's faulty Ram the laptop probably wouldn't boot at all. IMO.
This happened to my PC when one of the sticks was bad.

 

[Stuart]

Tobe, laptop would still boot with partly fault ram but not with a faulty stick of ram.

I would go with Ambushes thoughts although I would be interested to see a process dump of the PC once it becomes really slow.

 

[Kitah]

Might send a tech request through to them tomorrow, see what they suggest... my antiviral software has found nothing. This problem has been happening for a lil while now and it is driving me nuts. Either it will totally freeze and I cannot even restart it properly (did this 7 times the othernight and I gave up and left it off), or it goes so insanely slowly it literally takes 15mins just to open firefox. Programs keep crashing because it says there is inadequate memory, and on the odd occasion the computer reboots itself. All software I installed since purchasing the computer has been legit and genuine copies, I haven't downloaded any dodgy stuff (knowingly at least). No games on the computer- just word documents, heaps of photos, adobe production premium CS5 and that is pretty much it....

 

[Ambush]

Sounds like hardware troubles

 

[Kitah]

Process dump? When I open task manager it gives me a rundown of what proceses ars using what percentage of the available ram, cpu etc. When it runs extremely slow, it is only registering at about 2.5gb of ram is used for that one process i mentioned before, and about 40-60% of the cpu is spread across the hoard for system etc.

 

[Stuart]

I agree with Ambush, sounds like hardware.

By process dump, I was thinking along the lines of a Hijack This log after a scan where we can see what's happening and whose doing what.

 

[Kitah]

So the 'hijack this' thing is safe, i.e. I wont be inadvertently downloading something dodgy and worsening my problems? If it is safe I'll try it. Will also contact tech support and see what they rekon.

I swear I am jinxed when it comes to technology

 

[Kitah]

Thanks for the help and suuggestions so far.. will let you know, hopefully tomorrow, how I go with the hijack log thing. Will probably take 24-48hrs for tech to get back to me though.

Worst case... will start doing a backup onto an external drive, just incase.

Random.. I am assuming my laptop has two sticks of ram, each of which would be 4gb? So even if one totally failed would the pc still run on the remaining stick of 4gb? But even if that were the case, older computers were lucky to have 2gb of ram yet they ran way better than this laptop currently does...

And sorry snipercap- just saw you edited my first post.. sorry about that, I didnt realise it censored it.

 

[Tobe404]

Go in chat and I'll try a few more things if you want?

 

[Kitah]

I have to work in a few hrs, got to try and get some sleep. Will try again tomorrow afternoon

 

[Tobe404]

Ah righto. Well. Goodnight. Hopefully you have some better luck tomorrow.