Pound to a pinch of poo that most 'memory loss' is down to an anti-virus program
I'm sure that you are correct. In my case I have, over the years (three) succumbed to various recommendations to install and use several security programmes.
I'm not worried about these occupying space on the C-drive - I still have a third available unused - but the use of RAM (and CPU) as each checks my actions (or merely idling in the background).
How much is necessary is like any security and insurance - some will operate will the minimum whilst others will have belt and braces (sometimes un-necessarily) and I accept that there are different opinions as to what is 'essential'.
I have no doubt that I have significant redundancy in my 'protection', and some slowing of activity is acceptable, however, what brought this to a head was complete freezing of activity due to the direct activity of one programme carrying out a 'deep scan' at a time when I was actively browsing, and, together, these two activities locked-up more memory than the original 1GB supplied as standard with my computer - I had doubled this to avoid such situations, though this had not worked!
Looking down Task Manager I can see numerous activities that run and it is puzzling as to which are necessary and which could be dispensed-with - especially as some have identical names (such as
svchost.exe). Stopping some may have disastrous effect whilst others could be halted without effect - the question is,
which?
Currently I can see two
svchost.exe entries 'hogging' 50,000K and 40,000K respectively as well as another at 17,000K and several at 4,000K/5,000K and others at 2,000K . . .
TeaTimer.exe is occupying 34,500K,
RPS.exe 21,800K, and
sp_rsser.exe also 21,800K (all three being protection programmes - Spybot, PC Guard and Spyware Terminator).
Firefox is 'using' 300,000K.
.