Interesting Computer Problem

Started by Missy, April 22, 2015, 11:27:42 PM

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Missy

So about an hour ago I started experiencing some significant lag issues while gaming on my PC. It came up kind of randomly since the previous day the game I was playing played fine and I experienced no such issues until all of a sudden. Well looking at it on my task manager it appeared as though I was using a significant amount of my PC Memory/RAM, over 95%, so I tried a restart and things ran just a little bit more smoothly, but I ultimately had to stop playing because it was still giving me random lag spikes.

After I closed everything Mumble, the game and everything else which I had running I checked on the task maanger again and for some reason even though I have no other applications or windows open it still says it's using 78%, at the lowest, of memory/RAM.

I'm really not sure why this is and though I'm no expert I really think it's not supposed to do that . . .

I've checked in the processes tab of the task manager and I don't see anything which says it's taking up a significant bit of memory space and I have restarted my PC once since this problem first arose and it seemed to make no difference. I'm not really sure and am rather confused as to why this is even a problem so I'm kind of curious if anyone knows of anything that might be able to help?

sleepingferret

Just a few quick questions, ones I'm sure you've already looked at, but I just want to make sure of.  And one or two that are slightly more technical, again just to help eliminate somethings.


  • Have you been installed any new programs lately?
  • Or have you been running any new programs lately, like say trying out new voice chat software or chat programs and just leaving them running?
  • As for the memory percentage stated by Windows Task Manager; that also includes RAM cached by your PC but may not be in immediate use by any open applications that your system is using at the current time.  So aside from the high memory usage, is your PC reporting back as high CPU usage, when you're checking the Task Manager and say just basically just doing nothing else with your PC but sitting there at Window's desktop, with no real open/active applications; except for typical applications running except for say like your anti-virus and maybe Mumble and such sitting in-active?
  • Is it just one particular game or is it with just gaming in general that you are having this issue with?  And to be more specific with your problem are we talking performance issues with both online and single player games or just online games?

Missy

Thankyou very much for taking some time to help out.

So heres a bit more info, I'm not sure whats going on with it, but it's something I think I might continue to keep an eye on.

1) For new programs in the past week just Warframes (which is the game I was playing when I first started having problems). I was trying to reinstall another program which had stopped working last week, but that had worked fine for months without er. I installed Europa Universalis IV via Steam in the past month as well.

2) No new experiments, just warframes.

3) This is sort of the odd bit, last night my CPU usage was about nil, despite high memory usage, this morning the CPU usage was a little higher, but not quite so high. The other odd thing about that was last night the disk usage displayed much lower levels after I turned everything off, whereas this morning it seemed the disk usage was much higher, mostly full even.

4) I probably should have tested it last night, but this morning I tested one of my Fallout:New Vegas on my steam, single player offline and it was a little edgier than normal, but not nearly as bad. I have not tested warframes yet.

For additonal information, my Norton Internet Security has been expired since December I just learned, so I installed AVG Free antivirus before going to bed last night and ran a full system scan with it. It reported having cleared a Virus and several adware programs this morning (again it's odd that that has resulted in more usage of the CPU and Disk???)

I mentioned the single player offline game I tested being slightly edgy, but not as bad as was trying to play warframes last night. I was going to retest warframes to see if anything had changed  however I got what I think was a windows 8 approximation of a bluescreen, it was a bit prettier than the old ones had a frown smiley and said "windows has encountered an error and needs to restart".

Again it appears the conditions have changed since bluescreening and restarting. As soon as I was able to check once it had restarted and I had logged in the task manager displayed a 20% usage of memory. Since opening Chrome (and the ten to twenty tabs I tend to leave open somewhat lazily) that has climbed to 50% but has thus far remained below or around that. The CPU and disk usage seem to have remained fairly low and stable for now.

Oh and one other thing, looking at the cache usage as displayed on the TM, last night and this morning it was very low according to the TM, only hundreds of megabytes, whereas after the bluescreen restart it seemed to immediately jump to a gigabyte or two.

Again I want to thankyou for taking the time, I really do appreciate it.

Oniya

Quote from: Missy on April 23, 2015, 11:09:53 AM
For additonal information, my Norton Internet Security has been expired since December I just learned, so I installed AVG Free antivirus before going to bed last night and ran a full system scan with it. It reported having cleared a Virus and several adware programs this morning (again it's odd that that has resulted in more usage of the CPU and Disk???)

Have you run Warframes since removing the virus and adware?  'Cause I wouldn't be at all surprised if those were having an impact - especially since most adware isn't exactly the cleanest coding.
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sleepingferret

I agree with Oniya, try running Warframes; now that you have removed the virus and adware.

If you're still having issues, we can always go back to taking a closer look at any other things that could be causing an impact.

Nessy

Quote from: Missy on April 23, 2015, 11:09:53 AM

For additonal information, my Norton Internet Security has been expired since December I just learned, so I installed AVG Free antivirus before going to bed last night and ran a full system scan with it. It reported having cleared a Virus and several adware programs this morning (again it's odd that that has resulted in more usage of the CPU and Disk???)


Just a quick check, you uninstalled Norton right? You didn't install AVG on top of an expired Norton install?
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Missy

Thankyou everyone, it appears to be working fine now :)

@Nessa, no I haven't uninstalled Norton, how do you mean by 'on top of'?

Nessy

Quote from: Missy on April 26, 2015, 06:47:03 PM
Thankyou everyone, it appears to be working fine now :)

@Nessa, no I haven't uninstalled Norton, how do you mean by 'on top of'?

You typically don't want to have two anti-virus programs running on the same machine. Just because one is expired, doesn't mean it uninstalls itself or it stops working. Usually it just means you have old definitions, so it's not good against new threats but okay for the older ones. If you installed a new fresh version of AVG, I would recommend uninstalling Norton. I am kind of surprised you haven't seen odd behavior with both of them on there already.
Ons and Offs    Short Term Ideas,
Misc. Long Term Ideas

If you send me a PM and I don't respond, chances are I just missed it. Send it again!

Some heroes don't wear capes. Some just #holdthedoor.