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Windows 8 out of memory?

I thought that Windows 8 was supposed to be better with memory than Windows 7. So far, that is not my experience.


When I boot up my brand new laptop (Samsung NP550P5C-S03CA Intel Core i5 3210M 8GB 1TB ) , the Task Manager Performance tab tells me that I have:


8.0 Gb of DDR3 available of this:


3.7GB is in use, leaving 4.2GB available


3.5/25.9 GB is committed and 1.4GB is cached.


162Mb paged pool, 2.4GB non-paged.


I then go to the Details tab, and I add up the Memory used by all the processes. It comes to about 300Mb. That is 0.3GB. So what is using up the other 3.4GB of memory???


I then load up a bunch of programs that I use concurrently - notably Firefox (with about 30 tabs), Chrome, Thunderbird, Notepad++, Filezilla and my memory consumption goes up to 4.4GB. That seems about right.


I then work on it for a number of days, hibernating in-between, and I start to get notices that I am running low of memory. The performance tab says I am using 90% or more of my memory. The committed has gone up to 31GB. But if I add up the memory usage listed in the Details tab, it comes to only about 1800MB (I notice that Firefox has gone up to about 1300MB)


So, again, where has all my memory gone?


If I then close all the programs, it doesn't help. The details tab shows little running, yet the Performance tab shows I am still out of memory?


What is using up all my memory?


The only thing that clears it, is to do a restart. Which brings us back to the top of the loop, with the same initial question - what is using up over 4GB of my memory?


I never had these problems with windows 7.


As a sidenote, Win 8 also seems to be very unstable. Frequently getting programs not responding and crashing, including Windows Explorer, which seems to have to reload itself frequently.


Oh, and my wifi connection keeps dying and then I have to run the troubleshooter to get it all running again (my wife has that same problem on her brand new Acer).


So, what gives? How do I get my new laptop to work as fast as my 4 year old Sony Vaio with Win 7 and lower specs?


Anyone got any ideas? Or is this normal for windows 8?

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