What's using up all of my RAM?

[TREMAiNE]

Hi All

I have a new work laptop - nothing special, budget is typically up to about £550.

It's similar spec to the 18-month-old machine it replaced. It has a newer, faster processor (Ryzen 7 4000 series, old laptop was a Ryzen 5 4000 series with a lower clock speed) but apart from that they are largely the same. Both machines have 8GB of RAM, with 7.42GB being usable.

I'm having a real slowdown though running a few Excel sheets, a single Chrome Tab, and a few MS Office programs which makes most clicks in Excel cause a "not responding" and 5 seconds of freezing which is very annoying given that is where I spend the bulk of my work day...

My RAM shows as being 91% used but the literal numbers don't seem to add up, it almost seems as if I only have 4GB of RAM based on the amount of MB those processes are taking up... But I do definitely have 8GB...

What's going on?

[TotalControl]

Keep in mind Windows needs RAM itself to run.

[clockworks]

Shared graphics memory, taking a chunk of the 8gb?

[xeny]

As it's Windows 11, have you removed the Edge and limited Teams based chat icons from the taskbar?

I understand that if they are there they get preloaded into memory even if they aren't used. Alternatively, migrate from Chrome to Edge, it seems a little less memory hungry.

[Fast and Spurious]

Is your office 32 or 64 bit?
Excel in 32 bit will only address 2gb of ram.

[HRL]

Surprised you can buy a computer these days with less than 16Gb RAM.

Is the laptop upgradeable?

[maffski]

Those numbers are only the dedicated memory privately allocated to the processes, they don't include shared memory like external services, libraries and driver allocations.

This can get fairly extreme, for example I'm running a couple of virtual machines which on task manager show at about 200MB of ram, but that doesn't include the memory allocated to the virtual machine itself - so it's reading low by 26GB.

In addition the percentage is reading high as that includes things like the OS file cache - which will shrink if the memory is needed for something else.

If you want to check in more details you could try SysInternals RAMMap

Regarding performance it might be worth checking your power profile. There were some performance issues with Ryzen and Windows 11 so making sure the AMD drivers are up to date might help.

[GlenMH]

Does it have an SSD or an old style spinny disk? I used to see that kind of thing before I upgraded the old disk in my desktop machine.
More RAM is always good.