Memory hogging.
My four year old laptop (Medion Pentium dual-core 1.60GHz T2060, 1GB DDR2 RAM Vista Home Premium SP2) is used almost exclusively for surfing such places as PPRuNe and other Google searches.
I upgraded the memory to 2GB (Crucial) to overcome the bogging-down that resulted from extended surfing sessions with multiple (Firefox) windows open.
Last night it ground to a halt during a PCGuard anti-virus scan.
Firefox was occupying almost 500,000K despite me closing as many windows (with little effect on that figure) and RPS.exe had over 800,000K when things 'seized'.
Cancelling RPS.exe was the only way forward (other than a forced reboot).
My question is:-
Why do applications 'accumulate' memory yet not clear it when windows are closed? I'm talking specifically about Firefox, but the same seemed to be true (and to greater extent) about RPS.exe and how can I force these to give up this memory (other than closing them)?
Other processes that seem to hog memory include svchost.exe (two separate chunks of 66,500K and 34,784K and 11 other entries in Task manager totalling 120,500K!) and TeaTimer.exe (34,412K) with dwm.exe at 17,848K.