RAM being overwhelmed suddenly when playing games. . . why?

[Heather.Punk.Fae]

So recently, the last few days, I have closed games to find the windows warning saying that I am low on memory and to close programs to prevent memory loss. I have never had this, and I have 6GB RAM which should be plenty.

This seems to have happened in correspondence with me ditching Norton for BT Netprotect plus (Which is literally just Mcafee but given to BT customers for free) My memory hangs around 40-45 percent when I am just running simple processes like chrome or word, which seems quite high, but not sure if that is higher than usual. There is one MCafee process that uses about 200mb of memory, called mcshield.exe, but this might go up while I am playing games. I tried turning live-protection off and played some blacklight: retribution, and it crashed about 40 mins into gameplay. In task manager the RAM was in the 90 percent area.

Any solutions for this? I really like Mcafee so I don't want to replace it, heck it might not be even causing the problem. Here are some specs if you need them.

Operating System: Windows 8.1 64-bit
Processor: Intel core i5-3201M (Dual core running at 2.50GHz)
GPU: Unfortunately an integrated one - intel HD 4000 I believe
RAM: 6GB (5.90 usable)
It's a samsung laptop, unsure on specific model, but I have owned it just over a year now.

Let me know if you need more info. Thanks if you have a solution!

[Leoni Alves]

+)

[Heather.Punk.Fae]

Might not be noticing any changes as I have to play games windowed and at a lower 4:3 resolution to see what is going on on task manager, while the problems I have been having are when I play on fullscreen.

[Heather.Punk.Fae]

This seems somewhat relevant http://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/forum/windows8_1-gaming/windows-81-x64-low-memory-while-playing-full/e4602805-a1e1-4704-b006-92f43247b9e8

[Heather.Punk.Fae]

I will check the resolution of my games to ensure it is the same as my system resolution which is 1366 x 768. I might see if this helps me understand the issue. http://technet.microsoft.com/en-gb/sysinternals/bb896653.aspx

[Meow]

Well you are good at searching :D

That looks like it could be the issue, windows 8.1 is known to have strange glitches that are unexplainable.

[Heather.Punk.Fae]

Just tried portal 2 on my native resolution (same as my system res) and the one below in the options. Noticed fluctuating framerate on the non-native resolution, and clearly more ram was being used as seen in process explorer.

Will see how this goes with other games and stuff for the next few days, and post here if it turns out that was not the solution, but it seems we hit the nail on the head!

Thanks for the help man :) lovin' the username haha xD

[Meow]

Yeah its just a name that caught on in NS2 :P

Glad to hear you may have found the issue and that it is resolvable :D

[mozo1112]

ask Gabe