H
hogwell
I've been running Vista Ultimate on a Dell Precision laptop for months now,
dutifully downloading and installing Windows updates.
Sometime in the last week, the machine has acquired an annoying habit of
devouring all its memory on its own, then crashing.
It also won't log off anymore anytime.
When I first boot the computer, everything is normal, using about 48% of my
2GB RAM. (I run Task Manager)
However, even if I don't run anything, after awhile (an hour or so...) the
system starts gobbling up available RAM until I get an "Out of Memory" error
popping up and the system is hosed.
The odd thing is that the memory usage in the task manager stays stable -
adding up all the usage of all the processes does not come close to the 2GB
physical RAM that Windows claims it is using. This leads me to believe the
bug is in the kernel or one of the drivers, perhaps?
The other new symptom is that I cannot log off and shut down, even if I
shutdown immediately after booting up (before the out of memory problem). It
just hangs at "Logging off..." and the disk light flashes occasionally - for
hours - until I hold down the power button.
I'm not sure what caused this to start happening, but I think there has been
a Windows update downloaded and installed recently.
I suppose this could be a virus - but I'm running McAfee and have the
Windows Firewall on.
Has there been a recent Vista update with a fatal flaw recently?
BTW, I never had this problem Logging off before this week and the computer
*does* boot and log off fine in Safe mode with Networking.
How can I determine who is gobbling memory when it doesn't show in the Task
Manager's processes list?
Help!
dutifully downloading and installing Windows updates.
Sometime in the last week, the machine has acquired an annoying habit of
devouring all its memory on its own, then crashing.
It also won't log off anymore anytime.
When I first boot the computer, everything is normal, using about 48% of my
2GB RAM. (I run Task Manager)
However, even if I don't run anything, after awhile (an hour or so...) the
system starts gobbling up available RAM until I get an "Out of Memory" error
popping up and the system is hosed.
The odd thing is that the memory usage in the task manager stays stable -
adding up all the usage of all the processes does not come close to the 2GB
physical RAM that Windows claims it is using. This leads me to believe the
bug is in the kernel or one of the drivers, perhaps?
The other new symptom is that I cannot log off and shut down, even if I
shutdown immediately after booting up (before the out of memory problem). It
just hangs at "Logging off..." and the disk light flashes occasionally - for
hours - until I hold down the power button.
I'm not sure what caused this to start happening, but I think there has been
a Windows update downloaded and installed recently.
I suppose this could be a virus - but I'm running McAfee and have the
Windows Firewall on.
Has there been a recent Vista update with a fatal flaw recently?
BTW, I never had this problem Logging off before this week and the computer
*does* boot and log off fine in Safe mode with Networking.
How can I determine who is gobbling memory when it doesn't show in the Task
Manager's processes list?
Help!