~100% memory usage at start up

[-Veteran007-]

Well, my laptop has recently started, about 1 week ago, to have memory leaks at about 5-10 minutes after start up and lasts about 5-10 minutes, today even 20 minutes.

I usually start up the laptop from sleep, but I even tried from hibernating, but the memory leak is still there. I also tried antivirus, no viruses.

I watched Task Manager, when the memory leak was there, process called svchost.exe was using about 1GB of RAM, I have total 3GB of RAM.

I also looked at the services it was handling, the PID was 520 and there were a lot of them, so maybe you can see, what is the cause of all of this.

Now I took screenshots, for you to see what is going on:

These are the services.

And it shows how much of RAM it used.

 

I have Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit.

Laptop:

CPU: Intel Core i5 450M @ 2.40GHz

RAM: 3,00GB Dual-Channel DDR3 @ 532MHz (7-7-7-20)

GPU: 1024MB NVIDIA GeForce GT 320M

Case: Acer Aspire 5741G

Storage: 298GB Western Digital @5400rpm

[TheUnknown]

Clean your start up programs.Run malwarebytes just for sure.

[-Veteran007-]

Clean your start up programs.Run malwarebytes just for sure.

Ok, I do have quite a clean start up, that is one thing I have been keeping in control.

But the other thing, that I haven't been keeping in control is malware, wow, thank you, I found 7 malicious and 113 non-malware.

Do I post the malwarebyte results, or do I see, if the start up is ok now?

[Mojo-Jojo]

May I suggest you temporarily uninstall Avast! to see if that helps?

[-Veteran007-]

Clean your start up programs.Run malwarebytes just for sure.

Ok, as I said, start up is fine. Did run malwarebytes. Found 7 malicious malware, icluding trojan.... hijacker....  I am concerned, I thought I was being careful.

Now I restarted the laptop too, same issue appeared. The svchost.exe used ~900MB of RAM. This time it didn't "lag" out the system, was able to use it quite normally, before it froze for quite some time. And now the high RAM usage only lasted about 4 minutes.

 

May I suggest you temporarily uninstall Avast! to see if that helps?

I did not uninstall avast, although it isn't dangerous to do so, can it really be avast? I have had it for years and the problem started to arise lately.

[Mojo-Jojo]

I did not uninstall avast, although it isn't dangerous to do so, can it really be avast? I have had it for years and the problem started to arise lately.

I have had Avast! Pro for two years, and in the last year it was causing BSOD's, slowdowns and driver conflicts, in one case completely stopping the system from booting at all.

It's by far the buggiest AV I've ever used. Hence I always suggest people to uninstall Avast just to check.

[TheUnknown]

Ok, I do have quite a clean start up, that is one thing I have been keeping in control.

But the other thing, that I haven't been keeping in control is malware, wow, thank you, I found 7 malicious and 113 non-malware.

Do I post the malwarebyte results, or do I see, if the start up is ok now?

post a picture of your start up programs and there paths

[-Veteran007-]

post a picture of your start up programs and there paths

I used CCleaner for that, don't know if it is the best way to do it.

That is the startup list, as you see, most of them are disabled, but I included even the disabled ones, as I don't know if it will help you or not.

These are the scheduled tasks, it may be connected with these ones, as usually the memory leaks starts quite a bit after the startup.

[William12h]

What you could is boot into a clean boot and see if you still have High RAM usage then, if so then you havea diffrent problem then Start Up programs. 

 

I more or less disable all Start up programs except the few that i actually want like Spotify etc 

 

Your safe to disable all of your start up, nothing that i noticed is needed that you would actual need 

[-Veteran007-]

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Sorry for taking long time to answer, but I did try to cancel most of them, but avastUI thing said that I don't have permission to disable that, I didn't find how to disable it in the avast program itself.

Now, I didn't disable all of the startups, but I did 2 restarts for the laptop. 

First one was with most of the startups disabled and also, taking advice from @Mojo-Jojo I didn't exactly uninstall it, but I did disable 2 things, that it does at startup, the first restart was a success, it didn't have any memory leak at all. 

The 2 things were the check of rootkits at startup and allowing full access to the harddrive on startup. 

The second time I turned the 2 options back on in the avast, other startups stayed the same. This time the memory leak was there. I also used this time Resource Monitor it showed that svchost.exe was using a lot of hard drive when the memory leak occurred.

Is it really connected with Avast, what should I do? Start using another antivirus?

[Mojo-Jojo]

 

Sorry for taking long time to answer, but I did try to cancel most of them, but avastUI thing said that I don't have permission to disable that, I didn't find how to disable it in the avast program itself.

Now, I didn't disable all of the startups, but I did 2 restarts for the laptop. 

First one was with most of the startups disabled and also, taking advice from @Mojo-Jojo I didn't exactly uninstall it, but I did disable 2 things, that it does at startup, the first restart was a success, it didn't have any memory leak at all. 

The 2 things were the check of rootkits at startup and allowing full access to the harddrive on startup. 

The second time I turned the 2 options back on in the avast, other startups stayed the same. This time the memory leak was there. I also used this time Resource Monitor it showed that svchost.exe was using a lot of hard drive when the memory leak occurred.

Is it really connected with Avast, what should I do? Start using another antivirus?

 

Sometimes a reinstallation of Avast may already fix the problem - Avast has a quite buggy upgrade/update process causing existing installations to go bad all of a sudden.

If that doesn't fix it, then yes, I would suggest a different antivirus.

(You can always contact them about the bug; I have not only had bad experiences with them. Their support department was very helpful when I ran into a bug and quick to fix them.)

[TheUnknown]

 

Sorry for taking long time to answer, but I did try to cancel most of them, but avastUI thing said that I don't have permission to disable that, I didn't find how to disable it in the avast program itself.

Now, I didn't disable all of the startups, but I did 2 restarts for the laptop. 

First one was with most of the startups disabled and also, taking advice from @Mojo-Jojo I didn't exactly uninstall it, but I did disable 2 things, that it does at startup, the first restart was a success, it didn't have any memory leak at all. 

The 2 things were the check of rootkits at startup and allowing full access to the harddrive on startup. 

The second time I turned the 2 options back on in the avast, other startups stayed the same. This time the memory leak was there. I also used this time Resource Monitor it showed that svchost.exe was using a lot of hard drive when the memory leak occurred.

Is it really connected with Avast, what should I do? Start using another antivirus?

 

I don't use an antivirus.For MANY reasons...Let malwarebytes scan your pc every 2 days.Be careful of what you are executing and if you are not sure about an executable execute it in a controlled box (sandboxie,vmware etc).Or scan it online at:

http://anubis.iseclab.org/

 

Most antivirus softwares are useless if you ask me...Malwarebytes gets the job done.

[-Veteran007-]

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Well, again sorry for taking so long to answer, but the problem hasn't been constant these last few days. I have tried what you suggested, but still. I further looked at the svchost.exe with Resource monitor and there I could see, what it runs on RAM, CPU and HDD, and the problems is from HDD.

When the svchost.exe was using about 1,1GB of RAM(!WOW!), the disk was very active, the one thing that stood out a lot, with its high reading, was something called datastore.edb, it used about 2,3 million bytes per second, which is 2,3MB and now I have kept an eye on it, and it really is there, every time the system starts to lag and has memory leak.

The file path is C://Windows/SoftwareDistribution/DataStore/Datastore.edb