Why is my Computer Running low on Memory?

A question often asked by a lot of people is why their computer seems to run low on memory. Sometimes the only answer is that you need to upgrade your RAM. If you are running XP or Vista on too little memory then you are going to start seeing a lot of slow down. Luckily, a lot of times the problem is down to too many processes (that are not needed) running sill little programs and wasting the RAM you have.

To identify what programs are using up your memory, you can get a good idea from looking in the task manager at the process list. To access the task manager you need to right click on the start bar along the bottom (just on a blank part) and then click the Task Manager link in that menu. Once loaded you will see a small window open with several tabs running under the main menu. Click the Processes menu and you will see a list of all the current processes running on your computer along with the memory usage of each of the processes. To see a FULL list, check the box at the bottom left that says “show processes from all users”. Once you have the list ready you can click on the mem usage label at the top to re order the list in memory size. You may need to click it twice to bring the highest memory suckers to the top.

A number of things are normally safe such as svchost.exe which you will see several instances of it running at around 1,900K to sometimes up to 20,000K. Ones to look out for are things that do not sound familiar like one I just spotted now named offlb.exe. I have never heard of that process before, so a quick search on google was needed. By typing in offlb.exe in to google I scrolled down and found out by clicking on one of the results that it is actually an “office recovery program”. I see in this instance that the program is no problem as Office had actually crashed and asked me if I wanted to restart it. Once I agreed the offlb.exe file went away.

When you find time it would be worth working through the list, finding out what is ok and what can be killed (end process button). If you are unsure of how to permanently rid your system of unwanted or unneeded processes then check out this article named Why is my computer so slow and follow the links towards the bottom of the page which cover all the bases you need to check to get your slow PC back up to the speed you deserve.