On a spectre x360 laptop w 8GB of RAM running win 8.1, i noticed stuff getting really sluggish. In task Maanger I could see I was using an obscene amount of RAM (7GB/8GB) but perusing details and soring by Memory desc did not reveal culprit.
After some internet-ing I found that a common issue was non-paged pool size being large where the root cause is possibly a driver memory leak. sure enough, my non-page pool size was 3.2 GB even after restarting.
Under task manager->details, I tried to sort by NP Pool column, but the highest item had only 200k.
At a loss, I decided to try out a much touted solution: the registry modification of clearing the page file at shutdown. open regedit and
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Session Manager\Memory Management
look for ClearPageFileAtShutDown and set to 1.
After i did this, I rebooted and viola, RAM at idle down to ~2GB.
Can anyone help explain why this works?
Is there a way I can troubleshoot what the original issue was so that I can set this back to 0?