RAM usage goes to 80%

[Kaorichan2009]

I have no idea what is going on with my old laptop... but its ram usage keeps going to 80%+ while simply idling. It has 4 gigs of ram and nothing else is running other than MSN. I thought it was an overheating issue. Its not, I have a room fan under it cooling it. I thought the RAM was corrupted... Its not, put it in another computer and it ran until the harddrive ended up crashing.

My brother has to use the spare and I need to fix it since his computer was the one crashing <3 Please help.
This computer cannot stay on for long virus scans and malware scans may be out of the question.

He was able to run Dungeon Fighter last night without having any real issues... The ram usage stayed at 45 - 50% (The game is hard on the RAM)

Could there be something wrong with the system idling?

 

[Kaorichan2009]

It seems to do it every 6 hours... ON THE HOUR. Is there a virus that expands from 1 - 1 million K in 6 hours?

 

[Tmagic650]

You could re-load Windows fresh. It's a good thing to do on "old" computers with issues

 

[Kaorichan2009]

Well It's got a new hard drive and I reloaded windows recently. I really don't think my brother would want to wait a few days to get it up and running again. Updates are a drag. Especially when I have to go from Vista to 7 with that computer.

 

[Kaorichan2009]

Its been a month since it's been doing this and NOW it won't go past the Welcome Screen.

 

[Cinders]

OK, so you have issues. What I'd do is burn a copy of Memtest86+ to a blank CD, and then I'd try booting into the burned CD. I'd let the program run for seven complete passes assuming that I didn't get memory errors. If there were no errors after seven complete passes I'd assume the memory was good. If there were errors I'd assume the memory needed replacing.

OK, assuming the memory was good, I'd then find and burn the hard drives disk utility to a different CD. I'd then boot into that disk and at first I'd run the short test, and assuming the hard drive passed that test, I'd run the long test. If the hard drive failed either test I'd replace it.

You'll need a working computer to find the software and burn it to a disk. These are the first steps I usually take when I have computer issues, and I'm not sure what the heck is going on.

 

[Kaorichan2009]

I sure hope it's not the hard drive... /again/ I just replaced it. I'll run the test... but it did it before when I took out the ram and put a 2gig stick in from my brother's old laptop. Just to give it a test... I'll give memtest a shot.

 

[Dawn1113]

Apart from what has already been suggested, you might want to use Task Manager to check if there anything running in the background that is utilizing an unusually large amount of RAM.

PS: Ooops, sorry I was unable to read the latter post. Since you can no longer go past wthe welcome screen, then I suggest that you do precisely as Cinders recommends.