I've got a Lenovo Legion laptop equipped with 32 GB of RAM and I'm running Windows 11. Lately, it's been acting up—the performance has taken a nosedive, especially with Chrome crashing often due to an "out of memory" error, or just freezing up without any notice. It's not just Chrome either; other applications are also suffering. Occasionally, my screen turns black for a few seconds out of nowhere.
When I check the Task Manager, it consistently shows that I'm nearly maxed out on memory, even when I'm not running anything demanding. Recently, it peaked at a staggering 97% usage, and I took some screenshots earlier showing over 86% usage without high-RAM apps open (check them here: https://imgur.com/a/cNJPAya).
I can't make sense of this high usage since what I can account for doesn't even add up to half of what's showing. I've tried running some diagnostics on my RAM, which came back fine, and I attempted to use RAMMap, but it kept crashing until I finally got it to work. It reported that I have 17 GB of "active unused memory," which isn't linked to any specific process. It feels like there might be a memory leak, but I don't know how to confirm that or trace the source of the leak. After a restart, the memory usage stays under 50% for a bit, but then it shoots back up. I'm at a loss and getting pretty frustrated. Any ideas on what I can do to troubleshoot this?
1 Answer
First off, definitely run a full antivirus scan. Sometimes malware can cause strange memory usage issues. If everything comes up clean, check what RAMMap is detailing about your memory usage. What were its findings?
I did a full antivirus scan a while ago and it didn’t find anything. I was able to open RAMMap again and it said I have 17 GB of "active unused" memory, which seems linked to nothing. Could that really signal a memory leak? How should I investigate further?