Need help with Windows 7 machine

Well, 4 months ago I went against my own better judgment and bought a windows machine for my HTPC. It's not been stellar, but now it's total crap. As soon as I start the computer I see that the machine is using 3.77 our of 4 GB of ram at idle. Because of this, if I open windows media center I can go get a cup of coffee and return before it's actually opened, if it opens at all. No kidding. It can take 7 minutes for the program to open. Task Manager shows nothing is running, and if I look in the processes tab the things that are running don't take anywhere near 4 gigs of RAM. So something is running! What can I do to figure this out.
At this point, I'm ready to use it for target practice and get another mac, something I suspect I should have done in the first place. But here I am.

Any help is appreciated.

Sounds like malware or a virus to me? Do you pirate on that machine? My htpc used to get them when my ex failed at pirating stuff. I seldom have a problem with it.

All that ram is not in use, it's reserved so stuff starts faster!

WMC is the suck, use VLC.

Fwiw, I've found CLeaner to be very easy to use to see ehat is in the startup menu and such.

if you have nothing on it you can't do without or save.. wipe the machine and reload windows.

Seriously though, who still sells a 4gb machine?

You have automatic updates on? It might be downloading the endless windows updates in the background. I've found that is usually the cause of slowness on my ancient laptop.

I'd be scanning everything thoroughly, then installing another 4GB of RAM. As mentioned, VLC is your preferred option for media.

What Foxtrapper said. Download and run CCleaner, make sure to use the Registry cleaner in it and keep running it until nothing shows up as issues.

Those cleaners often cause as many problems as they solve...I generally don't recommend them.

I'm pretty sure this PC is running a 64bit OS, so your already lowish amount of RAM is practically halved (even a minimalistic Win7 64bit install will use over clean over 2GB of RAM initially after login). Combine that with Windows' ridiculous overuse of swap space and the computers sits with your hard drive chugging away while nothing in particular is using any huge amount of RAM.

Updates being installed in the background will also slow the PC down, so that could be contributing to it. That said the level of slowness you describe is unusually bad. I'd run a virus scan, use Malwarebytes and see what it turns up.

I remember the old thread where you asked for advice on building this HTPC, for the record I recommended Linux, my HTPC runs silky smooth on Bush Jr.-era hardware

It would cost very little to upgrade the memory. Do that.

Ccleaner does not cause problems that I've seen. I'm a former computer tech and it is a good tool.

Thanks for the suggestions. I'll run the cleaner and maleware utility things. I'll also upgrade the RAM.
RE Gameboy; I wanted to run Linux, I just don't know much about computers and didn't have time for another project. I wish I did though.
Usually the PC us using about 1.8 - 2.1 GB of ram and it works great. But I will upgrade it anyway.

Make sure you get the right one - there are some malware / adware programs that claim to be "registry cleaners."

Ccleaner is the most recommended one, and is here: https://www.piriform.com/ccleaner/download . The free version is fine. If you don't want your Internet history and cookies wiped then make sure to uncheck those options.

mad_machine wrote: if you have nothing on it you can't do without or save.. wipe the machine and reload windows. Seriously though, who still sells a 4gb machine?

Our shop desktops (1yr old) have 1gb.

Searching for info on forums was impossible before i installed Adblock. Some of those LT1/LS1 forums would have like 25 elements blocked.

In reply to Knurled:

and what OS are they running?

In reply to Stefan (Not Bruce):

Let's see... Win7 SP1, 32-bit.

Bwahaha man those things must be crawling! Unless they have SSDs maybe - basically letting a very fast swap file act as RAM.

Google "sysinternals process explorer" and use it to good effect. It'll let you see everything that's running, then you can look up anything that is using too many resources and then get rid of it. Since MS doesn't make it easy to see what's what, this comes in right handy.

When you're looking at Task Manager, on the processes tab, sort it by memory usage so the processes using the most are at the top.

Select the processes you want to investigate for memory use, right click and Choose "Go To Services" so you can see which services are using the memory.

I'd suspect that Windows 10 and/or Windows Update downloads are running in the background, but that's just a guess.

There's also some good guides online to help tweak and tune Windows 7 to use less memory.

That said, I'd seriously look at loading ether KodiBuntu or OpenElec on a USB key and running it on your box to see how it works and whether you like it.

http://kodi.wiki/view/HOW-TO:Install_KodiBuntu_from_a_USB_drive

http://openelec.tv/

I prefer OpenElec since its much more simple and straightforward.

Knurled wrote: In reply to Stefan (Not Bruce): Let's see... Win7 SP1, 32-bit.

Yeah.... that's the difference. He's using a 64-bit version of that OS with very little memory for it and he's attempting to run very Memory and VPU intensive processes on it.

Doubling or quadrupling the memory on both your machine and his should net a marked performance increase.

Interesting. I'm running 64-bit at home so that I can take advantage of huge... tracts of memory.

Mine idles about there, I think its normal. I recommend as much ram as the mobo can handle.

I ran Windows on my HTPC for a long time because Linux support for Netflix was not there yet. It is now. We've been running it for over a year now without issue. I feared wife acceptance, but she says its easier.

If I were in your shoes, this is what I'd do: Buy a Samsung 850 Evo SSD. 240GB should be about $80 now. Use this for the OS. Use your old spinning drive for storage if you need it. Since you don't know much about Linux, go with Ubuntu 14.04 64-bit. For whatever reason Netflix runs better in Chrome and Hulu runs better in Firefox (for me at least). If you install from a USB drive and have it download updates while it installs it should take less than an hour to have it up and running. The updates are what finally sold me on Linux. Reboots are rare, and you can have the whole thing up to date in minutes. As a reference, it takes me about 6hrs on a really fast connection to get a really fast Windows machine up to date with me sitting in front of it.

I realize change is hard, but its really worth it in the end.

For software, I have chrome, firefox, VLC, Kodi, Plex (to feed my other TVs), sickbeard, and Sonarr.

Task Manager is a deceptively useless tool in my experience. It seems to show things operating in the forefront only, not all the little things living in memory in the background.

That's why I like using CCleaner to easily inspect the startup menues. I say menues because there are more than one that need to be checked. CCleaner does a good job of showing you them. It is in these startup menues that I frequently find lots of little things being started and left to run in the background.

Using CCleaner and going through the caches also helps some machines. Not all, but some, in fact most. All the internet browsers create huge files of web pages and cookies, and drag the machine speeds down. There are frequently other programs that do similar things. Cleaning this stuff up helps a lot.

If your machine has had new software installed, I'd carefully go through the list and make sure the things installed are things you want and need. Be careful, both in what you kill, but also in what you keep. Seemingly innocuous picture viewing/sharing programs in particular, devour tremendous machine resources invisibly. A number of on-line games do this also. You don't have to run the program/game to have it eating resources in the background.

Lastly, beware of your internet connection speed and Windows updates. Doesn't seem to matter if you've set the system to do auto updates, or to do nothing. If there are updates to be had, and the machine is connected to the internet, it will download them. It may not install them, but it will bring them in and have them ready. Its that downloading that is the problem. It slows the machine way down, with no reason visible. It does not give a popup explaining it's downloading, so you've no idea why the machine is suddenly running like a dog. If you've a slow internet connection, it can take hours doing this.

foxtrapper wrote: Task Manager is a deceptively useless tool in my experience. It seems to show things operating in the forefront only, not all the little things living in memory in the background.

Task Manager doesn't show a lot of detail and doesn't have a great interface, but it will show everything that's running at the time (for the current user, or for all users if you hit the button at the bottom).

foxtrapper wrote: Lastly, beware of your internet connection speed and Windows updates. Doesn't seem to matter if you've set the system to do auto updates, or to do nothing. If there are updates to be had, and the machine is connected to the internet, it will download them. It may not install them, but it will bring them in and have them ready. Its that downloading that is the problem. It slows the machine way down, with no reason visible. It does not give a popup explaining it's downloading, so you've no idea why the machine is suddenly running like a dog. If you've a slow internet connection, it can take hours doing this.

You can keep it from downloading automatically, open Windows Update and click "Change settings" on the left. You probably have it set to "Download updates but let me choose whether to install them"