Windows 10 is taking too much memory

Question

I am a Windows 10 user. I have Dell Inspiron 15 5000 Series laptop with i5, 8gb ram.

Even when the laptop was new it used to create a lot of noise. After certain point of time I have realized that it is due to high memory consumption. Sometimes the processes consume a lot of memory and disk usage without any perceptible reason. This has become a big issue with the laptop. Most of the time I have chrome open and I have around 10 tabs open, and it starts making too much noise. I have tried killing some of the processes but to no avail. Sometimes it is some Windows process, thus it becomes impossible to kill it.

I would request you please help me solve this menace. Below I have attached some snapshots of the task manager. This is within 5 minutes of rebooting the laptop. Some System was taking too much disk space. Also the RAM usage is 2gb which is quite high. Moreover I would like to disable Cortana which is burden to my system.

Answer 1

I also own a Dell Inpirion 5000 (but it is a 14 inch), so I have had similar experiences. For a start, take a look at the resource monitor. It is built in to windows and is a bit more detailed than task manager.

More importantly, you seem to be talking about hard drive activity over memory. Memory means ram, not the hard disk. Ramhound is right that the 2GB you are seeing in RAM is fine, my idling is around 4GB (but I have a lot of background apps I should probably disable).

I think setup.exe has something to do with making sure windows 10 is all properly installed for you, so just wait it out. Windows 10 Seems to be pretty active about these sorts of things, it drives me nuts too. But know that the % disk activity is weird. It is more like what percentage of the time is it using the disk, rather than what percentage of maximum read/write rate am I at. You can see this difference with the performance monitor.

Noise suggests either the fan is spinning a lot, which means your PC is getting warm, or you could be disk activity. My Dell came with 5400rpm hard disk, which is a bit slow, you sometimes have to wait for it to work through a backlog.

Dell is pretty good at avoiding bloatware(which often makes things slow, loud, or overloaded) but if you have not installed many programs, I advise you to refresh Windows 10. This will wipe all settings and programs off of your computer, but keep user files. It is a good way to clean it up.

As for Cortana, this is a really detailed detailed guide on shutting her off, though based on your specs provided, she really should not be burdening your system. Something that can be a burden is the tips and tricks system. Go to settings -> system -> notifications and actions to turn it off.