I received a new HP OmniBook 3 with 16 GB of RAM and have been trying to run Minecraft and an emulator for Tomodachi Life. Minecraft warns that there may not be enough free memory, even though the laptop has 16 GB installed and the game is set to use up to 4 GB. The emulator also crashes, although that could be an emulation issue.
Windows reports roughly 13.2 GB of memory as being in use, while only around half of that appears to be explained by the applications shown in Task Manager. I also checked cached or standby memory, but that accounted for only about 1.4 GB. What could be using the remaining RAM, and what should I check?
1 Answer
First, restart the laptop and check Task Manager before opening any games. If memory usage is still around 13–14 GB immediately after a restart, look at the Memory section under the Performance tab and sort the Processes list by memory usage. Also check whether a large amount is listed as hardware reserved, compressed memory, or being used by the system/kernel rather than by normal applications. A background process, driver, memory leak, or incorrectly reported system state could explain the difference.
I restarted it and it was still showing about 13.6 GB in use, so I’ll check the Performance and memory details more closely instead of only looking at the visible apps.