Windows 7 runs out of memory and becomes unuseable...NOT CHECKDISK

this is happing with ALOT of Windows 7 systems and it has to do with the wmpnetwk.exe. my friend streams media to his computers and Xbox. we see that this process uses one core and ALL of the memory and the computer crawls to a stop. Start up in safe mode and turn OFF media sharing. pressing ctrl+shift+esc will bring up the task manager and look if this is indeed the problem. at least this might get you going enough to find another solution if this doesn't help... Good Luck!!!

Run Task Manager before this happens, set it to always-on-top, sort processes by VM Size. (Task Manager automatically sets its own priority as 'high'.) Then wait for the "explosion" to happen.

"Does unusable mean Task Manager doesn't run?

Another approach... start removing devices and/or device drivers one by one, until the problem goes away. This takes a while, but usually works."

Steam is a hog. If you have problems after ending steam, then you need to look at AVG. If you still have problems, you may need to check out services. If all else fails, get more RAM or increase your page file. Both aren't that difficult.

"You might be better running perfmon than task manager. You can set that up to actually log the stats of all the processes running. There's another stack overflow article explaining how.

That means you'll need to start perfmon when you initially log in (or start it from your startup programs maybe) and get it logging then just minimise it. Hopefully when some naughty process kicks in and starts gobbling all the memory perfmon will log it's actions which you can then look at after a reboot.

P.s If you haven't heard of perfmon it comes with windows (and always has) although not many people know about it."