High Memory Usage - a Firewall / Antivirus issue?

[klem]

Originally Posted by mazex

If you have a stateful hardware firewall in your router (most people have) I see no reason to use more than the built in firewall in Windows 7. Regarding all third party tools like membooster etc I would never use them myself as a long time IT professional. IMO the operative system should be left alone taking care of the memory (that's one of the main purposes of an OS ), and if applications are written as they should, they should take care of their own memory allocation/de-allocation... A third party tool will only mess things up... I never use any such tools and I never have any problems with crashes etc in Windows 7 that are not related to poorly written third party code. The last 10 years I have only been running non intrusive firewalls live AVG, Avast and lately Microsoft Internet Security (free download from Microsoft that is completely adequate if you don't mindlessly download crap from Piratebay etc). Last time I had to re-install my system due to spyware/viruses was in the 90:ies. Occasionally I scan my system with Spybot or Ad-Aware but it really should not be necessary (and I never install their "automatic" background services etc). Make sure you know what all running processes do and minimize applications that are initialized at startup by default and your system should have the best possibilities to work as it's supposed to do...

Then of course there are applications with memory leaks like CloD in multiplayer, but a memory leak is a problem that membooster will not be able to handle anyway... I don't know any IT-professional that uses stuff like that - and absolutely no reg-cleaners etc that will only cause problems. Make sure you don't need them by not messing your system up in the first place instead

So... summary of my advice as a development manager in a high security company... Run a system that is as "lean and mean" as possible with a bare minimum of stuff running that are is not necessary. Regularly check which processes that run on your system with either taskmanager or a better tool like the free tool "Process Explorer" from Microsoft. Do some research on processes you cannot identify and get rid of them if they are not needed. Use the least intrusive antivirus you can find that gets a good scoring at sites like http://www.av-comparatives.org, and then make sure to use common sense and you will not get viruses or other problems.

Good luck! /Mazex

Hi MAzex, many thanks for that clear explanation

I suppose I use a third party antivirus/firewall because for many years Windows Security systems, along with IE, had a reputation for being 'weak' and full of back-door loopholes that could easily be exploited. Unfortunately I haven't found anything to say that has changed although you clearly have faith in MS security so I will give it a try.

My Router is D-Link DIR-655 and Stateful Packet Inspection is enabled.

I take your point about Membooster and realise that the memory leak won't be fixed by it. I have been using it as a 'high memory usage' warning (its audio) but I'm in the habit now of restarting CoD between sorties so I can probably live without that. It only warns me, it doesn't prevent a crash.

I used AVG before Commodo but they introduced an element that was intrusive (can't remember what) and it couldn't be turned off even in Task Manager. Actually I've discovered that I have had both Microsoft Security Essentials and Commodo A/Virus running at the same time (I thought I had turned MS off) although, in Control Panel, Windows Firewall was off (now turned on) so I am going to uninstall Commodo and see how that goes. I assume Microsoft Security Essentials is what you meant by "Microsoft Internet Security" and that it gives me everything I need. Automatic updates is set to 'check and advise'. I looked at that comparatives website you pointed me too. I wonder why MS can't achieve ADV+ status.

There are of course a huge number of processes running which I'll try to look up but frankly I don't know what most of the system/MS processes are but some of hte others should be recognisable.

Thanks again for the info, lets see how it goes.

EDIT: By the way I was looking at something called Gamebooster which does shut down a lot of Processes before launching the game. Do you know of that?
It also suggests the following Tweaks:
Diable 8.3 names for NTFS and speed up disk access
Disable last Access for NTFS and speed up disk access
End Hung Applications faster (basically halves the timeout values)
Make system shutdown faster (Reduce WaitToKillServiceTimeout from 12000 to 5000)
Increase IE download sessions (from N/A to 10)

Any thoughts on those?