Hi there. My explorer.exe is showing in my system resources as currently "hogging" 1.92GB of my 8GB of RAM and I have NO idea as to why it would need that much RAM. Can anyone provide some tips as to how I can diagnose this situation? Thank you!!
kill the process and restart it. when the process starts, how much ram does it use? how long does it take to get up to such a large usage? do you have a shedload of folders open, or some heavily customized desktop?
because its there to use, it uses it... its how windows has always been. You can run XP on 64 megs of ram (at least SP 1...) but you give it 4 gigs, and it'll eat up 1 gig + idling if you let it. (not just the OS but all the stuff MS throws in also...)
Sorry dude i have to disagree here. Our fellow friend is talking about explorer.exe and not in general. Explorer should take ~8 336K. hartigan, can please show us a picture of the task manager, with all its task (scale the window so that we can see everything that runs (or try to get that, but make sure we see explorer.exe))
It could be part of the SuperFetch thing in Vista? The more programs you have installed, and the more RAM you have, the more stuff it will load up to speed up the applications later.
no, this isn't superfetch. superfetch keeps more programs loaded into memory so vista doesn't have to go out to the disk when it needs them. it can't magically make a program bigger than it actually is. and if for some reason it is superfetch, it's not normal behaviour. this is some sort of bug in explorer.exe
Thank you all for your replies. I'll try to address each, in order. 1: supertoad - Tried stopping explorer.exe with "End Process". Well, it got rid of it, but then again, it got rid of everything on my desktop and I had to restart my computer. I wasn't too sure "End Process" would work, but I thought I remembered a time on XP when opening "My Computer" and that process froze, I was able to "End Process" explorer.exe and it came back in like 10 seconds or so. No such luck here. 2: ConKbot of Doom: Um, interesting theory, but not sure I'm 100% with you on that. This symptom is only recent. Typically explorer.exe would occupy only 15-17 MB. 3: GoodBytes: Here's two pictures, 1st of the problem (at 9:20pm EST) and the 2nd is after the reset (9:40pm EST) I had to do after "End Process"ing explorer.exe. 4: pimonserry and supertoad: don't think it's superfetch because again, I think it would have presented a while ago since I've had Vista installed for about 1.42 years. Only just now has it shown up. 5: Measter: Don't think I have any third-party plug-ins for explorer that I know of. The one thing that I was doing before I saw this problem was capturing screen video with Camtasia. I know this program caches a pretty large avi file somewhere and I wonder whether that file got hung up in explorer.exe somehow. Dunno. Only thing I do know is that a reset (indirectly, the solution arrived upon through supertoad's original suggestion) has reigned in my explorer.exe. Presently it's bouncing back and forth between 16,336 and 16,773 K which I'm VERY happy with. FLUSHED the bug with a restart. Kinda wish I could have solved it without a reboot, but I'll take what I can get. THANK YOU!!
sorry, i probably should have mentioned that after you kill explorer.exe you have to go over to the applications tab and click new to get a run box, then you can just type "explorer.exe" to restart it. keep your eye on it, it could start leaking memory again. and maybe keep track of what other programs you run (especially things that put entries in the right-click menu) for a while so you can figure out what's causing it.
Yes, and also make SURE you have no toolbars and stuff installed on your system, and that the bare minimum start with Windows starts (remove any speed launcher, Agent type of software, softwares (MSN and alike), system tray icon (like java, and quick time/iTunes),. Keep stuff to basic, like mouse/keyboard software and A/V.
