What is using my RAM and CPU?

[Condi]

I have an old Surface Pro machine which I use for work, and up to now it's been great for emails and web browsing etc. However, recently I have been using it with an external dock to power 2 external monitors and performance has gone to st, to put it politely!

A little more investigation shows that RAM usage is at 95%+ the whole time, disk usage is 95%+ and CPU usage is very high too, even when not connected to the monitors or doing anything at all. In task manager under "users" I can see that my login is only using 10-20% of CPU usage, and nowhere near the whole 4GB of RAM the machine has, and yet there are no other users logged in, and haven't been since the system was shut down. From this I an only assume Windows is using all the RAM, disk and CPU time to do stuff in the background. The question is what is it doing, and how can I stop it, or are there settings etc I need to change? Unfortunately some/many settings are controlled by work and so I am limited to tools already installed, or within Windows itself.

Any help would be appreciated.

[sparkyhx]

task manager to get the breakdown of what is using what, then work out why?

One drive/google sync, virus check, updates downloading all could be hogging if its not been used in a while

[omniflow]

If it's a managed device, then chances are you won't have rights to see what's chewing up resources.

It could be AV or some other security program.

4Gb isn't much RAM these days.

Assuming you've done a total power off reboot, then your best bet is to get the IT dept at work to look at it.

[xeny]

USB dock? my guess would be the displaylink driver.

[Brother D]

4GB Ram is pretty low if you are running multiple apps on multiple screens.

How is performance just having a single app open? Task manager will tell you what process is utilizing resources.

[anonymous-user]

Possibly the indexing service.
See if you can stop it and if the CPU goes down.
Then try rebuilding the search indexes.

Loads on the web about this thing. Unfortunate because it's handy having all your stuff indexed.

[ReverendCounter]

A couple of guesses:

- could there be some sort of native vs non native incompatibility whereby the PC is having to adapt and provide the needs of the new set up?

- does the dock have a verifiable background, like is it yours/new? If not, and it has USB or storage capability, perhaps it has a virus that affects any PC it gets attached to.

[Condi]

So I detached it from the dock, and shut it down, then it was much better when restarted. CPU and disk use back to "normal" (10/20% etc), although RAM use still higher than I would like but nowhere near as bad as it was.

Am going to see what happens, but if it does it again when attaching the dock then it may be the displayport drivers causing issues. It's only got to struggle on for a few more weeks until a new laptop arrives and then IT department can take a look.

Thanks for your suggestions though, I will try some different things.

[xeny]

Just to be clear DisplayPort and DisplayLink are very different things.

DP is a dedicated physical connection for running monitors - generally trouble free.

DisplayLink is a way of funnelling a display output over a USB connection, and can at times be troublesome/performance sapping as you're doing something the hardware isn't really intended to do.