Windows 10 - Memory Leaks

I'm trying to determine what is causing a memory leak on my Work PC - its an old machine running Win 10 Pro - i7-5930, 64GB ram, Gigabyte X99 motherboard.

The issue has only started a few months ago, but can't for the life of me work out what the issue is. I thought it could be the new Brave browser I installed, the machine is left on 24/7, and was rebooted Friday - come Monday morning and I can't login - black screens, so have to do a hard reset.

I only worked out it was a memory leak as I noticed over a period of a week or so, I see the the memory usage increase, and closing apps doesn't reduce the memory usage.

I've tried a few of the memory optimisation apps, such as wise memory optimizer - but these don't seem to work.

Any thoughts on what it could be, before I decide to do a full reinstall of Windows?

Apps wise I've got a lot of different things installed, but as I work in digital forensics I need quite a few different programs, so have quite a bit on the machine.

Thanks for any input.

Program updates may improve memory handling so are all programs up-to-date? Same thing applies to drivers so are all drivers up-to -date?

wiganken said:

Program updates may improve memory handling so are all programs up-to-date? Same thing applies to drivers so are all drivers up-to -date?

thanks, updated all drivers today, apps I'm going through these as we speak, and uninstalling what I feel is not needed.

I noticed today the monitors kept flickering and losing display, apps would show the outlines but only black boxes etc, so I uninstalled the graphics card drivers and ran driver cleaner, then reinstalled everything.

I'm hoping it was just a problem with graphics card drivers, but I doubt it, as it was using up RAM alot of the time, this started happening this morning when RAM was at 44% usage, so not overally high.

I see your AMD Radeon R290X graphics card was released October 2013 so are driver updates still being issued for it in 2021? The reason I ask this is to get you to check the date of the latest drivers for it. They may be quite old and the compatibility gap beween them and latest Windows 10 version could cause some unpredictable issues. Consider getting a new graphics card that is still in-support phase?

Also, with it being "an old machine" are you able to get the latest version of Win 10 Pro or are you limited to an earlier version?

wiganken said:

I see your AMD Radeon R290X graphics card was released October 2013 so are driver updates still being issued for it in 2021? The reason I ask this is to get you to check the date of the latest drivers for it. They may be quite old and the compatibility gap beween them and latest Windows 10 version could cause some unpredictable issues. Consider getting a new graphics card that is still in-support phase?

Also, with it being "an old machine" are you able to get the latest version of Win 10 Pro or are you limited to an earlier version?

Thanks, it could well be the case, The machine is running Win 10 Pro - newest version. Graphics card wise I'll look into it, I don't need anything special, as we don't game.

It does still seem to be using quite a bit of RAM, but I'll leave it running over the weekend and see what happens, and if anything falls over again.

Post a screenshot of Task Manager - Performance tab showing memory info. This is critical information.