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I've a client with a Lenovo A540 All-in-one, 8GB RAM, 1TB SSD drive, Win 8.1. She is occasionally getting low memory errors.

The computer is relatively new, has had an active BitDefender subscription from day 1 and AFAIK, has the latest drivers installed. Memory is managed by Windows (no changes made to paging file settings).

System shows Commit Charge at over 95%, which I suspect is related to the low memory error. See link.

Sysinternal Process Explorer memory results are also shown in the below link.

Any insights about how to identify the culprit here? I'm offsite in another city and troubleshooting via remote, so must be careful about disabling startup services.

Screenshots:

Commit Charge:

enter image description here

Process Explorer:

enter image description here

DavidPostill
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Veni Vidi Vici
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  • [This](http://superuser.com/questions/684112/windows-8-64bit-say-low-memory-while-4gb-free/706128#706128) explains what is really going on. – Ramhound Jul 07 '15 at 18:50
  • Hi Ramhound. That page you linked to suggests manually modifying the paging file to enlarge it. Windows has already allocated 30GB, which seems ample. I'm reluctant to alter the paging file size if the problem could be a memory leak or misbehaved driver. I was hoping that the process explorer results shown in the link I provided might provide some insight. – Veni Vidi Vici Jul 07 '15 at 19:13
  • Your link gave me a permission error. Use the upload image option and post just the urls – Ramhound Jul 07 '15 at 19:21
  • You can verify its a memory leak from a driver by selectively loading each individual device driver – Ramhound Jul 07 '15 at 19:22
  • Hi. My apologies about the screenshots. I've just edited the original post to give links which should work now. I'm a new user at SuperUser and was denied the ability to embed images. – Veni Vidi Vici Jul 07 '15 at 19:32
  • Regarding selectively loading device drivers, that could be tricky. As I mentioned, I'm offsite in another city (3,000 miles away) and troubleshooting via remote, so must be careful about disabling startup services, drivers, safe mode. – Veni Vidi Vici Jul 07 '15 at 19:43
  • [memory leaks caused by drivers](http://superuser.com/questions/598714/how-do-i-diagnose-memory-usage-leaks-of-drivers) – Ramhound Jul 07 '15 at 19:52
  • Okay. I'll pursue the xperf and VMMap avenues, but before doing so I'm wondering if you saw anything in the Process Explorer screenshot in the original post which revealed anything. – Veni Vidi Vici Jul 07 '15 at 20:09
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    Start8 - Stardock. From what I know about it, it hooks into explorer and can/has caused issues, such as crashing windows explorer due to some interaction with search indexer. A series of crash & recover cycles could easily cause odd behavior. I would start there. After than, look for cruft like "memory/cache enhancers" that some laptops are bundled with. – Yorik Jul 07 '15 at 20:16
  • Those crashes (if not imaginary) may show up in the event logs. – Yorik Jul 07 '15 at 20:17
  • I earlier reviewed the event logs. Nothing obvious there. There have been near daily errors in the log about the Windows defrag process failing but I'm nearly certain that's because I replaced the HDD with a SSD. – Veni Vidi Vici Jul 07 '15 at 21:01
  • @VeniVidiVici This won't be something that can be spot on a screenshot, you have to, investigate the possible causes to solve it – Ramhound Jul 07 '15 at 23:44
  • post Pictures of RAMMap: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/ff700229.aspx – magicandre1981 Jul 08 '15 at 04:16
  • @magicandre1981. I can do that next time the low memory condition happens (it's only every 10 days to 2 weeks when it does). Restarting the computer clears the condition. What particular screenshots of RAMMap did you think it would be useful to see? Also, I should add that 95% of the time, the only foreground applications the user has open are MS Outlook and possibly Firefox. That was the case yesterday when Windows popped up a low memory warning and I posted the above screenshots. – Veni Vidi Vici Jul 08 '15 at 15:57
  • Best is to save the data as RMP, zip it, upload the zip and post a link. Here I can look at it in more detail. – magicandre1981 Jul 08 '15 at 17:01
  • @magicandre1981 (and all). Thank you so much. It may be another week or two before I'm back in the forum with the RMP data since this is an intermittent issue and there's no point in posting the data until the low memory issue next occurs. – Veni Vidi Vici Jul 08 '15 at 21:46
  • You have 2.5 GB on your modified page list. That's startlingly high for an 8 GB machine. For some reason your system seems to be unable to write this stuff to the pagefile or to mapped files. It's supposed to do so. From some threads I've found around MSDN, I would suggest looking for processes with handle leaks. It is not clear to me how large numbers of handles would inhibit pagefile writes, but that's what's in the reports I'm seeing. You'll need to enable the "handles" column in Task Manager or Process Explorer. Please do that, sort the processes list by that column, and report back. – Jamie Hanrahan Aug 26 '15 at 10:25

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My wife has the same computer. We had the same problem. Google Chrome kept crashing. I used the "Search" function and typed in memory. A "Diagnose Memory Problems" app came up. I ran this and had no further problems. The memory issue fixed itself. Good luck.

Clark C.
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