Computer Slow? Are Your Applications Using Too Much Memory?

The amount of memory, or RAM, that your computer has available, is arguably the single most important factor in determining how efficiently and quickly your programs load and run.  So the more memory-intensive programs you have running simultaneously, the slower and less responsive your computer is going to be!

How can you determine which programs are hogging this precious memory and bogging you down, often causing a slow and unresponsive system? Some are chugging away in the background without you even knowing about it!

Windows has a very useful little application called the “Task Manager”, which pops up a little window on demand, showing you just this! Here’s how you can use it to your advantage.

Right click on an empty area in the task bar at the bottom of your screen and select Task Manager from the menu that pops up:

The Task Manager will open.

Now click on the tab labeled “Processes”:

This shows a list of all task running, but you want to be able to see which are using the most of your precious memory (RAM).

So click on the heading of the right hand column where it says “Mem Usage”. Click right on those words – now do it a second time! You’ll see that the tasks running are now nicely sorted with the most memory-intensive ones at the top of the list:

This gives you a better idea of what may be using large chunks of memory without you even being aware of it.  In the above example, the Carbonite online backup program is currently doing a backup and hogging lots of memory. One can easily just open Carbonite and pause it to free up that memory if required.

Try this out and see what is running and what is using memory. If you are not sure what the Processes in that list do, simply Google them and you’ll be able to read that up.

We’ll be talking about some Outlook hassles and how the Task Manager can help you solve them in a future post!