pagefile / virtual memory problems

Lately I've been having a problem with my laptop (m1530). When I leave it on for a few hours, browsing the web along with playing not-so-demanding games (warcraft III), eventually il get a message on my system task telling me my virtual memory is low, and when i press ctrl-alt-del and go to performance, the page file usage is up at 6.80 GB (and i have 3gb of ram), and no matter how many programs i close it wont go down. The only way to fix it is to reboot, which is also giving me problems:

Whenever i go to start > restart or shut down, everything closes as it should, but when the screen is stripped down to only the wallpaper and nothing else, it stops. I cant hear the hardware working, and even if i let it go, the laptop wont restart/turn off for approximately 15 minutes. The only way to fix it is to hold the power button till it turns off, and press it again to turn it back on. I dont get any error messages on reboot or anything, but its annoying (and a sign of malfunctioning software i think?).

Incase it helps, i reformated to XP about a week ago when i bought the laptop (32 bit). Anyone got some pointers for me?

I was previoustly asked to run a memtest, which i did and after 1:42:07 hours it completed and gave me a pass, with no errors. This leads me to believe the problem is software orientated, but is there any way to test which program is sucking up the memory without simply watching the control panel? Thanks in advance

PS: im pretty sure the reboot problem is related to the pagefile problem.
PS2: i compared 2 printscreens, one from now and one from about 4 hours ago when i rebooted, and it shows the same number of processes, 2% difference in cpu usage (at the bottom of the processes tab), an the commit charge is vastly different: 745M/4956M for the initial screenshot, and 4373M/6880M from the recent shot.

 

turning off your pc the way you are is not doing your drive any favors...this won't fix your issue, but run a few chkdsks

Your problem sounds like a memory leak of some kind, but detecting memory leaks is not as easy as it seems. The question is what are you running that has not been nearly 100 percent tested? Beta software? Propritary software? Your own code?

 

im running the same software i ran on my old pc i bought in june '07 that i used up till now with no problem, with the only exception being the drivers as the driver disc didnt have any drivers for xp 32bit so i had to find them on the net (it came with vista 32, but i dont like vista).

Im using the same XP i bought with my pc, so i dont see how that is the problem either. It could be the media direct partition, however i doubt that as well because it isn't actually running. I cant remember exactly but im pretty sure it ran fine before i reformated, so i highly doubt it is a hardware problem.

ive been letting it shut down properly lately, although it takes 15-20 minutes to do so...., but this isnt what triggered the problems so.....

In the end im probably going to reformat again, and just not install the media direct partition (i never use it anyways), but im going to have to wait till i can find a weekend where i can go home and pick-up my E-HD to backup my data .

 

A memory leak if it eats up to 6GB space should be easy to detect. Open task manager go to View / select columnsand check multiple of memory items. Especially the paged memory. While taskmanager in the default configuration display only taken main memory it will now also show the paged memory. Thery will be one process or service which will occupy most of the 6GB. That's the faulty application.

In the past I've seen two drivers leaking:
. intel wireless drivers
. upek fingerprint sensor

 

i dont see "multiple of memory item" unless your refering to something else.

This is all i see:


there is one value that is really high, and its a process for the nvidia driver, and under page faults it is listed at 34 700 300 roughly and climbing. Not sure what it meens though

 

BIG EDIT: i clicked to cancel the bcmwltry.exe process (the process under the nvidia driver, at about 18 000 000 page file errors )and my pagefile dropped from 5gb to 637 mb ish

i think i found my problem! thanks alot!

now is there any way to block this process from starting up, or better yet, removing it?

i found a way around it to access my wireless card so its not necesary to keep imo