In Windows 7, is it possible to somehow prevent an already-running process from consuming more than a given amount of memory? Microsoft's , as far as I can tell, only allows manipulation of processes launched through it, so it's not helpful in the case of a process that's already been started.
120979
I am running the latest version of X3 Terran Conflict (3.1) and after about 30 min - 1 hour it's memory usage goes well above 2 GB.  I only have 4 GB of ram, running Windows 7 64 bit.  As a result of X3 using more ram than is available, my hard drive starts paging and makes the game and other applications become unusable.  I have to restart the game.  Is anyone aware of this issue or how to fix it and is there any way in Windows or through some tool, to limit how much memory is given to the game?  Is this a bug in the game? Can this even be fixed?  I'm using some mods but I doubt any of them are causing this as they are simple mods like adding a tractor beam etc.
68057
How do I remove the warning before deleting a shortcut in Windows?  Every time I want to delete a shortcut it warns me that I'm not actually deleting the program, just a shortcut.
62304
The new Task Manager has a great UI in windows 8, however, there are some discrepancies in the data I can not account for:  Machine: 8 GB of total ram. (This is a physical machine, not a virtual)  The processes tab shows 45% of Memory utilized.  The listed process do not add up to 3.5 GB of RAM, but instead add up to 0.948 GB. There is no "processes for all users" option.   The performance Tab Shows:   In use : 3.6 GB Available: 4.4 GB Committed : 4.1 /9.2 GB  Cached: 3.7 GB Paged Pool: 376 MB Non-paged pool: 135 MB  My reading of this says I have ALOT of "cloaked" processes running some where eating my ram.  How do I interpret this data and how do I verify it?
66246
I need to get a history of which processes have run on my Windows machine, and when they were run.  However, I cannot use any third-party software, as I cannot guarantee that it will always be running.  Is there any way to get this information only using Windows built-in functionality?
35452
I thought that Windows 8 was supposed to be better with memory than Windows 7. So far, that is not my experience.  When I boot up my brand new laptop (Samsung NP550P5C-S03CA Intel Core i5 3210M 8GB 1TB ) , the Task Manager Performance tab tells me that I have:  8.0 Gb of DDR3 available  of this:  3.7GB is in use, leaving 4.2GB available  3.5/25.9 GB is committed and 1.4GB is cached.  162Mb paged pool, 2.4GB non-paged.  I then go to the Details tab, and I add up the Memory used by all the processes. It comes to about 300Mb. That is 0.3GB.  So what is using up the other 3.4GB of memory???  I then load up a bunch of programs that I use concurrently - notably Firefox (with about 30 tabs), Chrome, Thunderbird, Notepad++, Filezilla and my memory consumption goes up to 4.4GB. That seems about right.  I then work on it for a number of days, hibernating in-between, and I start to get notices that I am running low of memory. The performance tab says I am using 90% or more of my memory. The committed has gone up to 31GB. But if I add up the memory usage listed in the Details tab, it comes to only about 1800MB (I notice that Firefox has gone up to about 1300MB)  So, again, where has all my memory gone?  If I then close all the programs, it doesn't help. The details tab shows little running, yet the Performance tab shows I am still out of memory?  What is using up all my memory?  The only thing that clears it, is to do a restart. Which brings us back to the top of the loop, with the same initial question - what is using up over 4GB of my memory?  I never had these problems with windows 7.  As a sidenote, Win 8 also seems to be very unstable. Frequently getting programs not responding and crashing, including Windows Explorer, which seems to have to reload itself frequently.  Oh, and my wifi connection keeps dying and then I have to run the troubleshooter to get it all running again (my wife has that same problem on her brand new Acer).  So, what gives? How do I get my new laptop to work as fast as my 4 year old Sony Vaio with Win 7 and lower specs?  Anyone got any ideas? Or is this normal for windows 8?
104199
As a developer it is very common for me to have 2-3 different IDE's open, 10-15 google chrome windows which can hold up to 200 open tabs (I know I get out of hand some times), Photoshop, couple twitter bots for promo, and a few other programs but my system still runs fast and smooth.  I have an i7 processor with 12gb ram.    Now with all my usual stuff running my Physical memory is usually running around 50-60% however over the course of the day or much less even, I will gradually grow to 98%  The highest Memory usage processes will be from Google Chrome, if I sort in the task manager by highest memory usage and end the 1 highest process which will be a google chrome one, my memory usage will jump back down to about 60%.  Also by ending that 1 process, all my Chrome windows will remain open and in use, so it doesn't affect me at all by ending that process.  Based on this research I am assuming that that 1 runaway process is likely the Adobe Flash as I also can say that it gets up to the 98% much faster when I am using flash items like video or music player.  But even without using any of them it will still climb up to that high number eventually.  Has anyone else experienced similar results?
115032
I just upgraded my computer's RAM, adding another 4 GB to the computer.  Windows 7 acknowledges that 8 GB is installed, but says only 7.5 GB is accessible.  Any idea why? I thought since I had the 64-bit Professional version this wouldn't be an issue.
87784
Can anyone explain how Windows effectively limits the CPU?  Last time I tried some tricks to let my laptop not overheat, so I tried limiting the CPU to 70%.   As for my suprise it stopped my laptop from overheating - even when launching CPU intensive applications which caused my laptop to overheat and shut down, didn't overheat my laptop anymore!  I looked at task manager but the "CPU intensive" application still uses ~95% of CPU and the windows task manager shows a total of 100% CPU usage.  I have limited the CPU usage here ("plugged in" option was on 70% [both min and max] when testing the CPU intensive application):    How does Windows do this magic?   I see 100% CPU usage yet my CPU does not overheat. And I do not see any performance differences.  Does Windows limit the CPU speed? Like, if I have a 2.4 GHz processor, on 70% it will only have 1.68 GHz when limited? How is this possible (changing the CPU speed)? I thought you can only underclock when in BIOS?  If not, how does Windows accomplish this if not by changing the speed?    Side question: If it's about the speed, is there a way to set the CPU max state to 200% ?
77890
I know that Windows XP 32-bit can be configured, through , to support more than 3.5&nbsp;GB of RAM.  Is there a good tutorial to do this with Windows 7 32-bit?  As to why I don't simply use 64-bit Windows 7: The software for my Internet connection (cell phone-as-modem) will only work in 32-bit environments.
80217
I am using Windows 7 64 bit with 8G ram. After some use, I feel Windows is getting sluggish. The drive is thrashing. When I look at the resource monitor and disk activity, I see a few instances of use of the page file (c:\pagefile.sys). I check the physical memory and I see about 2.3G available memory and 700M free memroy.   Why doesn't Windows use more of the free memory and less of the page file? Does it need to leave some x amount of free ram, how much would that be? Is it a percentage of physical ram?  My plan is get more ram and an SSD for the main drive. Meanwhile I am suffering from slow performance.
37538
While I'm downloading a large file on Windows 7 using Google Chrome, my computer goes to sleep. I could obviously set the computer to not sleep at all (or change the interval before the computer sleeps).  What I want to know is: Is there a way to make Windows 7 not sleep as long as a download is in progress? (perhaps when any network activity is going on?). I've looked in the Advanced Power settings, and haven't seen any obvious setting.
22205
I want use 4GB of RAM.  Can I use in Windows XP 32-bit?  Or should I go for Windows XP - 64-bit? Does it support 4GB of RAM?  Does Windows 7 32-bit support more than 4GB of RAM, or is >4GB support only available in Windows 7 64-bit?
55016
I have a problem that my windows 7 computer sometimes starts accessing the disk like crazy for maybe 10 minutes at a time. The process in question is the "system" process. I have disabled superfetch and hibernation on my computer, if that makes any difference. I disabled those to see if they were the cause of the problems, but no change. I have 6 GB of RAM and only the web browser was started when I took the screenshot, so I don't think it was thrashing due to page faults.  Any ideas on how to find the cause of this?
89035
I have a relatively new (under 2 yrs old) Windows 7 machine. It has 9GB of RAM, and an i7 core CPU (930 @ 2.8GHz w/ 8 CPUs). After about 8 months since a clean install, I noticed my computer was running slowly. I figure it was fragmentation etc, and I did a complete wipe &amp; clean reinstall.  However, my problems are somehow persisting. The computer is running painfully slowly (but in leaps and bounds - sometimes it will work fine for 3 hrs, then suddenly freeze up just from clicking the start button). The 'freezes' happen randomly - not during any especially intensive computing. I initially thought something might be eating through my CPU and/or Memory, but Task Manager indicates that neither the CPU or Memory spike. In fact, even during serious lag, CPU usage remains at less than 5% and Memory at ~ 1.5GB.  It's beyond me why a fresh install on a powerful machine is performing so poorly. And it certainly is frustrating!  What could be causing the poor performance, and what can I do to fix it?
42246
I have been having an issue where, if my system is up for a few days without being rebooted I will start getting warnings saying "Close programs to prevent information loss" and then a dialogue suggesting I close programs, which I can either cancel or hit "close programs" and Windows will force close some or all of the applications listed in the dialog.  I open task manager, and see that only around 30% of my memory is currently being used:    When I open resource monitor to see how much committed memory is being used by specific applications, I still see relatively low memory usage:    I've had this problem for awhile and have struggled to find a solution. I've investigated causes like a driver leak by using poolmon, but never saw anything in poolmon that matched what others have described as red flags for a driver memory leak. What makes me particularly confused is why Win10 is telling me to close applications when I only have 33% of system memory being used.
68669
We are trying to develop a small application that can monitor the programs/processes that are executing in a windows machine.  If the program/process is not supposed to run, it should be blocked. It works similar to an antivirus.  This is the basic idea.  I want to know the ways to hook into the OS to get notified about every single program/process trying to run in the machine.
7794
With commands like top and the gui based System Monitor I can see that at the moment I have several zombie processes.  What are zombie processes?  Do they affect the performance of the system or the application they are zombie to. Do they use too much memory or any memory at all?