Microsoft Windows 10 Using High Memory/Ram? Here’s The Fix

Memory or RAM being maxed out by Windows 10? It’s not because you have less RAM or you use Google Chrome, its because of those faulty drivers

Microsoft Windows 10 launch on July 29 was expected to be the polished build with majority of the issues ironed out. Yes, majority of the issues ironed out, WHICH means there are chances that your Windows 10 installation, setup or usage might be marred with bugs. it’s not completely necessary but there is a chance that it might be infected.


High Memory/RAM Usage

The new OS from Microsoft was expected to be lighter, faster and utilize a much simpler UI. It has received checks on all those fronts but not for all. Some users have taken to forums to complain about Windows 10 utilizing outrageous amounts of RAM. The memory utilization is so extreme and at times goes up to 100% that it brings the PC to a crashing halt.
Less RAM Is Not The Problem

It does not have to do with the amount of RAM users have installed on their machines. Users having 4GB of RAM haven’t had complaints and yet there seem to be certain users with 8GB and even 16GB of RAM installed on their machines and experiencing high RAM usage problems by Windows 10, so it has nothing to do with the amount of RAM installed.
Memory Leak

Instead, the problem lies at the heart of drivers. Windows 10 is experiencing driver incompatibility issues for a lot of users, and a faulty or outdated driver is causing what is known as a Memory leak. Closing processes and especially Google Chrome browser does not help resolve the situation, and the Task Manager isn’t your best chance of identifying the issue. Memory leak leads to inaccurate memory allocations, and can thus exhaust the system memory.

How To Fix It

So how do you address the memory leak and faulty driver issue? First bit of advice; disregard all the Windows 10 drivers that have been automatically installed in the first place. It is true that Microsoft updates the drivers automatically and they are supposed to be compatible. However, Windows 10 has run into a lot of bugs which are being slowly addressed, hence the chances of a device driver being incompatible are highly likely.

Step 1: First step is to download the Windows WDK from Microsoft’s official website. Once downloaded, install it and this will install the Windows Driver Kit for your computer.

Step 2: Bring up Command Prompt and make sure you start CMD as an administrator. Once WDK is installed, navigate to the installation folder and click on poolman.exe to start it up. Once poolman starts, you need to sort it with after pool type, press ‘P’ for that. Next, press ‘B’ to sort it with bytes. Now this might all be confusing but by exactly following the above procedure you will be presented with the tag that is consuming the most memory.

Step 3: In the CMD window that you had open, type ‘cd drivers’, without the quotes and then type ‘findstr /s xxx *.*’ The xxx is the tag that you will get from poolman. For example, if the tag is abd then the command will be ‘findstr /s abd *.*’. Hit enter and you will be presented with a system file.

Step 4: Head towards the system file labeled as abd.sys (an example), and check the properties to find the driver manufacturer and version.

Step 5: Once you have identified the driver, head towards the manufacturer’s website and download the driver relevant to Windows 10. Install and reboot your PC to see if the RAM problem is resolved or not.

Some users have claimed that restarting the PC addresses the RAM problem, but it’s a temporary one. Windows 10 is known to tax the RAM and it’s probably because of a memory leak caused by a faulty driver. If this resolved your issue, please let us know in the comments.