RAM keeps filling up causing very sluggish browser response.

[Doug]

Advice requested.

My Dell computer is loading RAM to the point of causing my browsers to have a sluggish performance.

I have brought up the resource manager showing where it starts upon booting up and where it ends up twenty minutes later.

I have run the MS Defender Antivirus (offline scan) and RAM still loads up to the maximum. 

I am still looking for whatever program is loading all this into RAM.

I think it is other than Windows Defender.

Any tips?

[Doug]

I have countered this problem by loading up all the programs I anticipate using during a session immediately after booting up, before the unidentified cause gradually takes up 95% of the RAM. The computer works fairly well this way. I am still trying to nail the cause for the RAM hogging. Perhaps it is OneDrive, or possibly even malware. I noticed that the amount of RAM taken up is about 16GB, which is the maximum capacity on the Dell computer. My HP computer has 32G of RAM and it loads up around 16GB also. I will eventually figure out what program is overloading the RAM on the Dell computer.

[Alan J. Raul]

May I suggest downloading and running Microsoft Sysinternals Autoruns. This app is a single exe and does not install. Autoruns shows which apps startup when Windows boots up.

You can uncheck questionable startup apps. If you determine that malware is starting up you can delete them. Be careful if you decide to delete a startup app. It's best to uncheck it first.

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/downloads/autoruns

[Doug]

Alan,

I have downloaded the Microsoft Sysinternals Autoruns.

A few items have been unchecked with only minor results. Acronis True Image (2017) is the only pesty program that seems to keep restoring itself despite being unchecked from Systinternals. I had to disable the adm.exe (Acronis Drive Monitor) from the Task Manager Performance List a few times. It is disappointing that the once-sensational program has become such a persistent nuisance. Whether I set it to autorun or not, it seems to occasionally load itself up and start an OS backup. I prefer to arrange for backups manually when I can take the time to do so. I still keep it to counter the Macrium Reflect backups if something should happen to go wrong with an attempted restore of the WIN10 OS. When True Image is loaded and running, the lethgargic performance, when included with Firefox, makes it almost impossible to surf the web or do much of anything else. The method of loading Firefox as soon as the OS has loaded up has resulted in a satisfactory improvement in performance online (see attached SNIP).

I have concluded that 16 GB for this Dell computer is not adequate. The HP has 32GB, and none of these concerns of inadequate RAM occur.