Resolved Running out of memory

I just purchased 5 dell Latitude E5400 laptops for my employees. With just firefox running I started getting out of memory alerts. I went into task manager on all of them and the memory usage. varied from 900mb to 2.6gb. Task manager couldn't really point to any major memory usage.
The one webpage that was up is a very bland webpage. No animation or activity of any kind.
Is there any setting to look at that could be causing this?

 

This article should help answer the problem.

http://windows.microsoft.com/en-US/windows7/Preventing-low-memory-problems

 

New factory computers have a lot of junk programs all which load on startup. Reducing that junk can free a lot of memory & hard disk. I routinely use PCDecrapifier to cleanup.

 

Thanks!!
Still looking.

 

Been on the phone with Dell Support. They had me reload all of the drivers. did absolutely nothing.
Will try to find the culprit this week.

 

Did you receive these computers in the state they were last used or have they all been re-installed with Windows 7 or the Dell recovery discs.

 

I received them this way. (Brand New)
Was advised from "Pro Support" to update all drivers in a specific order. It was suggested to reinstall the OS if that failed. That would put me in the position to run all drivers again.
Not starting off to well on the batch.

 

All I can advise now is that you look at the information in the link I gave in post 2.

Have you got an OS disc for each machine or Recovery discs?

Do these computers all have the same identical software installed?

Are all these computers identical in every way regarding memory, hard drive and CPU?

How many of these computers are using excessive memory?

 

5 of seven are identical in every way. With nothing running they are all using 30% of the memory. I'll check out your link.
Thanks

 

this might not be very helpful, but i noticed W7 alone uses a bit under 1GB ram.
with nothing running (W7 32bit) is constantly between 25 to 30% memory (out of 3250MB)

 

Well that is somewhat helpful. It strengthens my assumption that Win7 is a memory hog and I should have went for the XP downgrade.
My personal machine doesn't use that much with T-bird, firefox, word, and Quickbooks running at the same time.

 

i don't have access to my W7 machine, right now but i could double check and report back to you tomorrow.

 

If it helps, my Windows 7 system is about 33% of 4GB of RAM.

I think it would be safe to say that your 5 computers running at 30% are OK, but how much RAM do they have?

What differences are there with the other two computers and what % are they running at?

 

Ron, your assumption is incorrect. Win 7 uses RAM much more efficiently than XP, but in XP era 512 MB was a very big thing but now 1-3 GB is the sweet spot. The OS uses the extra RAM to cache things - your programs, data etc. If it didn't, then your RAM would be free but of no use.

So don't go only by "FREE RAM ".

Have you tried uninistalling junk softwares ?

 

These are brand new machines.
Now the "Dell control point" is junk to me.....what others would you suggest uninstalling on a new machine?

 

I can't really seem to find anything showing an overuse of memory......at least not at this moment.
Haven't had the "out of memory" alert since the first day (Same day I posted this thread) that I turned the machines on. At that time I looked in "Task Manager" and Firefox was the highest mem user but nothing close to enough to be using all of it.

 

An easy way to see the major differences between the machines running normally and those that did have low memory warnings is to put them side by side with "Task Manager" window open and basically spot the difference. There has to be some programs running on the high memory usage machines that are not running on the others. or identical programs with big differences in memory use.

It would still be usefull to have an answer to my previous questions in post 7, 9 and 14 regarding the difference in spec between the machines and if you have recovery disc/s or OS discs, etc. What is the memory use on the high use machines?

 

Ok. I did not do that when they were giving me the "Out of memory" alert but I have since and there are no differences between running applications right now.

Ok.

Yes I received these computers new from Dell. I did install updated drivers on one of the 5 latitudes. It is performing exactly the same as the other 4.
I did not reinstall with Win7 or the recovery disc.

1. Yes I do have the OS disc.
2. Yes these computers do have the identical software.
3. Yes they are identical regarding software, hard drive, memory, CPU etc.
4. 3 of the 5 had the "out of memory alert" at one time but haven't since.

The 5 Lats had 3 GB of RAM but now have 4GB They were running anywhere from 28%-30% they are now running between 24%-26%.

The other 2 computers have mostly the same software but had 2GB or RAM (Dell messed that up somehow)
They now have 5GB of RAM.
They were running at 33% but are now running at 21%.