is Windows 7 a memory hogger?

Actually... I know better than to ask such dumb questions but I thought it would grab your attention! I think the problem is more due to 3rd party software i.e. Firefox/ Palemoon hogging up my memory. I just did a fresh install of Win7 Pro 64-bit. I am surprised that with 4 GB of DDR2 RAM, that my CPU meter gadget shows approx 90% of my RAM being used up. This is about after 10-12 hours of uptime. (less than a full day).

When I open up task manager, I see that my Firefox and Palemoon browsers are responsible for hogging up the majority of that 90%.... the explorer process is yet another huge pig....

I am having to reboot constantly. By constantly I mean once a day or every 2 days. I say this because this is far more frequent than when I was running WinXP where I would reboot the system 1x every 10-15 days. I would like to ask if anyone else is getting such high mem usage after less than 24-hrs of uptime.

I can answer with two pictures. One is my memory use with IE; FireFox; Windows Explorer; Corel Paintshop (Memory intensive!) and downloading MS updates at the same time. The other picture shows what I have normally loading in my Startup tab. - All I feel is needed - the remainder can be called on demand.


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I should add. This is Ultimate 64Bit on one of my laptops.

One possibility: If you have windows search features on it may be generating indexes in the background. Though windows is supposed to adjust usage of background tasks based on current demand, it may feel there is enough available for this and it may require several hours if you have a large fresh hard drive.

I've only seen my memory usage up to 2GB once. That was during a memory spike while I was being attack by a Virus. After removing the Virus my usage went back down to 1.2GB, comparable to davehc's snapshots.

Well I gotta wonder what is up with my system. This is my 1st time running a 64-bit OS so I wasn't sure if this was normal or not... but after considering all of your replies, I am beginning to think that this is definitely not normal.

Before I posted my question, I tweaked my services by visiting black vipers site - it has only been a few hours since but already my RAM usage is creeping uptwoards the 60% mark with only a few applications open. Fx and palemoon, antivirus, 3-4 instances of notepad.

I've got nearly 20 add-ons installed in Fx and palemoon - I'll have to do a test one day by starting up these applications in safe mode to see if those addons are the culprit. Only problem is that I'm so addicted to my addons that surfing an entire day without them will probably... give me da...shakes.. Sort of like me trying to go for more than a day without coffee....

davehc:
I've already got my applications trimmed down in msconfig. But I do appreciate the feedback.

Trainable Man:
I turned off the indexing service for the OS drive so we'll see if that improves the situation.

You need to post a screen capture of what is going on. Use the Snipping tool to do this.

A screencap of what exactly? If you're talking about the task manager, I've already looked through the list and I've already pinpointed the 3 biggest memory hoggers.... please see my post above.

Yes, post a screenshot of the task manager with memory usage in order from highest to lowest.

It will be used to determine anything unusual going on. Naming the top three doesn't give a full picture or even if any of those top three are using unusually.

A picture is worth a thousand words! Really helps to let us see the real issues going on.