Win 10 Firefox uses lots of RAM

[cj5362]

I recently upgraded to Win 10 (from Win 7) and have noticed that it runs really slow, especially with Firefox, which eats up a lot of memory, so slowly that I have trouble writing emails and scrolling webpages.  I had 4GB of RAM and upgraded to 16GB two weeks ago, but haven't seen much of a difference.  I read this article recently that Windows 10 compresses pages in memory and have looked at Windows forums and there seems to be no solution to this.  Some of the forums I looked at suggested that if FF is using a lot of memory it might also indicate a virus or malware.

I just posted to the malware removal forum and was told that my computer is clean.  Any suggestions on what I should do?  Are there any other sorts of tests that you could help me with (virus or OS) to diagnose what might be happening with my machine?  

[David H. Lipman]

• Create another account under Win10.  Make that account an "Administrator" level access.
• Logoff and then Logon using that newly created Windows 10 Account.  That will setup the user profile.  Please wait until it is completed.  We can consider Windows 10 Accounts as "profiles".  This new profile is a temporary test.
• Reboot the computer.
• Login using that newly created Windows 10 Account.
• Wait until the PC is quiescent.

Use Firefox and reproduce the conditions where you experienced "... especially with Firefox, which eats up a lot of memory, so slowly that I have trouble writing emails and scrolling webpages. "

 

The objective is to see how things run under a new profile as compared to as how things run under the Windows 10 Account you actually use daily.

[cj5362]

Thanks for the suggestion.  I created the new Win 10 account and opened up FF, sent emails from two email accouts., viewed YouTube videos, logged into Facebook, went to ESPN.com (which always runs slow for me), and it was definitely running much faster than it does with normal account.  I then let FF sit for a while to let the usage creep up and it was still running fast after about 30-45 min. 

[David H. Lipman]

Thanx for the update.  It confirms my suspicions that it was User Profile related due to the OS Upgrade.

See how it continues to works out. 

It may be a situation where you create a specific new account that you will subsequently use.  Setup what you access and then port all your data from the slightly dysfunctional profile to the new profile.

 

[cj5362]

Thanks!  Is there a way to figure out what the culprit is?  Btw, I do both complete system and file backups with Acronis.  Should I just reinstall the OS and any programs that I want and then bring all my data over?  Are there other possible options?   

[cj5362]

Just realized that I don't have the Win 10 software, since I did the update directly from the prompt on my laptop and just updated from Win 7.  Not sure if that would complicate the OS-reinstall as an option, if that's a good one.

[David H. Lipman]

Windows 10 Media Creation Tool.