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I have been using my computer to play games using Steam such as CS:GO (Counter Strike: Global offensive) and TF2 and other common steam games. Steam itself runs fine, but my computer itself crashes with a blue screen mid-game at random points. I have 4GB of RAM, and I restarted the computer with no programs running (except for an Anti-virus and normal Windows processes) and saw that nearly a Gigabyte of memory was being used. The total of the normal processes was barely equal to one or two Megabytes.

Processes after just starting up the computer (bdcam.exe is just to take the photo):

Can anyone see anything out of place? Or can anyone show me a way to allocate more or less RAM to certain programs? Thank you!

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  • What do you mean by "normal processes"?
    – gronostaj
    Commented Jan 10, 2015 at 7:25
  • share the dmp files from C:\Windows\minidump to a cloud service and post the link here.
    – magicandre1981
    Commented Jan 10, 2015 at 7:36
  • Memory is relatively cheap, why not just install more if you feel memory starved?
    – mdpc
    Commented Jan 10, 2015 at 8:16

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Windows can handle running out of memory gracefully. 4 GB is a lot of RAM and using 1 GB after reboot is pretty normal.

You have a different problem, probably driver- or hardware-related, that causes Windows to crash with bluescreen.

Use programs like BlueScreenView to analyze crash dump files, it will help you guess probable cause of this issue.

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I don't see how you can write "The total of the normal processes was barely equal to one or two Megabytes" when the very first process you list is using over 120 MB (120,000 x 1024).

Also, the "Memory (Private working set)" column is only part of the total memory used by Windows + the processes.

1 GB "used" after bootup is not at all unusual on a 4 GB machine. And keep in mind that very little of what is "used" is permanently allocated to its present use; in particular, long-idle processes can have their memory repurposed for other needs.

In short there is nothing unusual showing in what you've posted or described.

Crashing in graphics-intensive programs like games is usually caused by problems in your power supply, video card, cooling, etc. Driver problems can do it too, of course, but even video card drivers are a lot more stable than they used to be.

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  • The first process (120M) is no doubt the Superfetch process used to buffer data. You can turn off this service via windows services snap-in. However the buffer might actually be helping. I would definitely turn it off if you are using SSDs.
    – mdpc
    Commented Jan 10, 2015 at 8:15
  • Possibly, but... the svchost that's hosting SuperFetch on my machine is by far not the largest svchost I see, and it is only using 43 MB on a machine with far more than 4 GB RAM. The RAM used by SuperFetch to store the cached data is not in its process working set, so it cannot possibly be part of the 120MB or of any other process. It's on the standby page list, where it can be repurposed FAR faster than if it was in a working set (for this reason it is not counted as "in use", but rather part of "available" RAM).
    – Jamie Hanrahan
    Commented Jan 10, 2015 at 9:08

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