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My Vista laptop all of a suddden started using up alot more ram 45% of my memory is being used but what ever is using it s not showing on my processes or the resource monitor.

I used 2 different AV, spybot and hyjack and nothing showed. I restarted, defraged the hard drive and still nothing. While the memory is very high the CPU is very low.

Does anyone have any ideas?

Are you sure it's not SuperFetch (Coding Horror Link)

I've had people who just switched from XP get really angry that vista uses so much memory when it's just superfetch before

And keeping memory usage down is silly, free memory is wasted memory.

I don't mind being used up except when I try to run a program and the ram that used to be there is being used up so the system runs sluggish. And when the laptop came with Vista the thing was only using about 15% of the ram instead of 45%.

Edit- if vista is using up the free ram shouldn't the system run better not more sluggish?

If you open the start menu and type "services", you can disable the superfetch service (doubleclick it, set to manual and press stop). Disabling indexing might be worthwhile too if you rarely use search. Windows defender is another big hog, I always disable that on every machine and replace it with adaware. Disabling those 3 alone will pretty much put you back to XP functionality/memory management. Disabling UAC can have a slight performance boost due to the driver it uses being virtualized, but it's not really worth the security risk if your going to be running as admin.

If you think there is stuff starting up in the background, you can run "msconfig" the same way as services and take a look at the startup tab.

edit: also in msconfig, under services, if you click "hide microsoft services" you can see exactly what 3rd party services are running and disable them if you wish.