High Ram usage and CPU spiking, long ordeal still ongoing

[Pow3rful]

Not sure if this is the right section but o well. I guess I should get you up to date with my system. It was built in 2010, and worked like a charm for a very long time. Over this last summer is when problems started. I was having high heat issues I fixed the issue so I thought and went on my way. Now 4 months later I had higher heat issues and now they were also in my graphics card. Easy enough, I have a dust issue that is all resolved now and temperatures are steadily where they need to with the graphics card higher than normal but nothing crazy. Then another problem started, as explained in the link at the bottom of this post, essentially I noticed that the ram was idling unsually high. Right now it is at 58% of 4gb of ram. As i checked into the RAM issue i noticed that the cpu was constantly spiking between 0-20% and even as high as 100% at certain points.

So now more on system operation, i run two screen at high resolutions, and sometimes i get graphical bugs. If i drag a window across a screen every once in a while the edges will catch and there will be a ghost image of the window. When I play high performance games like SC2 it takes a rediculously long time to load games and frequently grays out with the not responding window dialog. It always comes back though. I was thinking that this could be do to the memory issues as well.

Now, hopefully you guys can help me out here is the link to a reddit thread that has links to the full history of my computer issues:

[Troubleshooting] **Update** Video Card problems now a System problem : buildapc


Thanks in advanced, and if you need anymore information let me know

 

[Pow3rful]

Bump, Anyone know where i can get help?

 

[-RockMan-]

Bump, Anyone know where i can get help?

A few questions if you don't mind, when you said you fixed your problem last year what did you do to it ?
Yes the dust is gone, but have you looked into changing out the cpu grease ?
Also about your vga card, I looked at the image but I don't see anything too wrong with it.
Do you have current drivers for the vga onboard sound card ?
Have you attempted to clear out your temporary cache and files in windows lately ?
Have you defragged with diskeeper trial or any other suite ?

Its alot of questions, but I need most of those answered so I can get right down to the core of the problem.

 

[Pow3rful]

The problem was spiking in CPU temperature playing a certain game, my solution to that was resitting the heatsink and changing the thermal paste. This fixed the problem but at the same time I stopped playing that certain game and did not see heat spikes during any other operation

I bought a completely new heatsink not a week ago so everything on the CPU is fresh.

I believe it is up to date, but where could I check this again? Couldn't quite find it in the device manager.

I just defraged using defraggler, I also cleared out the temporary cache and files last week as well.

Any more questions please ask. Thanks for replying

 

[PP Mguire]

58% and CPU spiking with 4GB of RAM is just too many processes in the background. Something is accessing the CPU and background processes take up more RAM the more they pile up.

I believe a fresh install while minimizing start up programs can fix that issue. It'll also help your load times. If you have a dual core CPU it's best to try and keep background tasks to a minimum.

 

[Pow3rful]

Pretty sure the cpu is quad core, and startup is very minimal only the essentials ( so basically nothing). The thing with the ram usage is it doesnt spike i just gradually gets higher. I have checked the process tab adn there is nothing that would be taking up that much memory.

I would I go about a fresh install?

 

[PP Mguire]

How many processes do you have? With 8GB of RAM I typically have around 33. The last person to tell me he had minimal wound up being 87 which is way too much. For 4GB of RAM, you should be in the 30s. If you use Chrome with each new tab comes a new processes which can take a high amount of RAM. When you close the browser it all goes away again.

 

[Pow3rful]

Right now 60, but I have skype open gchrome open and I am installing some software while working on a lab. Startup was about half of that so around 30.

So you say 87 is too high for 4gb, but I have never had any problem before never going above 24% usage. Why all of a sudden?

 

[PP Mguire]

Because something is obviously utilizing your CPU in the background. If Windows gives that other process higher priority due to work load balancing then your game will get the short end of the stick. If your RAM usage is too high due to background processes then your game could be stuck in swap file as well as other critical processes meaning they are being used from your HDD instead of RAM which we all know is much slower.

Another thing it could possibly be is a virus which are also known to hog resources. I would do multiple scans on everything to see if it is Spyware, Malware, or a virus in the background.

 

[Pow3rful]

How would I go about doing a fresh install? I have ran all scans and everything is good