My company laptop has an impressive 16 GB of memory, even more than some of our servers. But without cutting down on memory usage of some programs, it occasionally uses up to 80% of memory and starts to run slow or hangs. While the problem may be caused by CPU hogging processes, more often it's because of memory usage. This note is about reducing memory usage to speed up the computer.

In Task Manager, you can go to the Details panel, sort on Memory, and decide on whether to kill any top processes. But I strongly recommend Process Explorer (https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/downloads/process-explorer), a tiny utility you can install without admin right. The first time you run it, it refreshes screen once per second. It's better to change it to once every 5 or 10 seconds (under View -> Update Speed). By default, processes are shown in hierarchy with clear indentation so you know parent (creator) and its spawned child (created) processes. Click the "Working Set" tab to sort on physical memory usage. "Memory Compression" pseudo process may appear at the top. Ignore it. See what processes take the most memory. The Description column helps. If needed, google the name to see what it is. Below are some tips.

1. Avoid killing any that you know are legitimate, especially security related processes such as those from Trend Micro. After all, you're using a company laptop. In fact, you may not be able to kill them anyway.

2. If you see anything you know for sure not needed, kill it.

3. Make sure the processes are shown in hierarchy. If not, click Process tab once or twice. Most companies use Microsoft Teams (ms-teams.exe). It's a memory hog if you add up the memory of all its child processes. In my case, one of the few msedgewebview2.exe processes under ms-teams.exe uses half a GB. In total, the working set is about 2 GB (although some of it is shared memory). To save memory, exit the Teams app and open a browser tab to https://teams.microsoft.com and let it stay open. You'll get about 500 MB back. The only feature you lose in using the web version of Teams is that in Outlook, the status or presence icon near your coworker's email address disappears (even if you run Skype). Also, remember to copy and paste the link of a meeting invite into the browser next time you join a Teams meeting; double-clicking the link in Outlook would open the Teams app.

4. If you use the Chrome web browser, it's a good habit to close some tabs you definitely don't need. Memory usage of the tabs varies depending on the content and complexity of the webpage. Inside Chrome, launch its Task Manager (Shift-Esc, or the 3 dots at upper right -> More tools -> Task Manager). Sort on "Memory footprint". If the Teams tab is near the top, don't end it unless you want to run the Teams standalone app. End those near top that you don't need. 5. In Process Explorer, you can kill a process tree, i.e. the highlighted process and its children. For example,

Creative Cloud.exe                123,724K
  Creative Cloud UI Helper.exe    181,776K
  Creative Cloud UI Helper.exe     25,528K
  Creative Cloud UI Helper.exe     33,524K
  AdeboIPCBroker.exe               20,956K
  Creative Cloud UI Helper.exe    128,052K
  Adobe Desktop Service.exe       111,672K
    Creative Cloud Helper.exe      45,400K
    CoreSync.exe                   61,084K
    CCXProcess.exe                 11,020K
      node.exe                    113,756K
        conhost.exe                13,216K
        Adobe Crash Processor.exe  19,088K

Killing the tree of "Creative Cloud.exe", a process for the Adobe Cloud application which starts up by itself but I never use, brings down system memory by 700 MB on my laptop. (The numbers to the right, working set memory, contain shared memory so we can't simply add them up to get how much we can reclaim when the processes are killed.)

6. But what if after you kill a parent process and its children, it immediately restarts itself and its children? This is one thing Process Explorer can do but Task Manager cannot. In this case, right click the parent process, select Suspend. Then kill its children. You won't save the memory of the parent process (because a suspended process still takes memory) but at least the child processes will be gone. For example, I have a process which I call A here, which spawns B, which spawns 5 CefSharp.BrowserSubprocess.exe processes, each of which takes 42 to 95 MB working set. The top, process A, cannot be killed due to privilege restriction by company policy. I can kill the mid-level B but it will restart (along with its children). So I suspend B instead, and kill its 5 child processes, saving about 400 MB.

7. If you often use Windows console (i.e. cmd or command line), choose Windows Console Host as the default terminal application. You can right click on the title bar of the console window -> Terminal tab -> Default Terminal Application to verify. If you're not using Windows Console Host, right click on the title bar, your console window will open a new tab called Settings. In Settings, go to Startup -> Default terminal application. Set it to "Windows Console Host". Then a new console (cmd) will use Windows Console Host as the terminal program. The new, fancy "Windows Terminal" as the default terminal app costs you 250 MB per console (the process is WindowsTerminal.exe), while the Windows Console Host (process conhost.exe) uses less than 40 MB, and if combined with its parent cmd.exe which uses 11 MB, uses 50 MB at most. Basically, the new terminal is worth it.

8. Lastly, Control Panel has a pane with a group of settings for performance instead of GUI beautification. Search for "performance" and click "Adjust the appearance and performance of Windows". In the first tab of the popped-up Performance Options pane, select Custom. Uncheck pretty much everything. I only set "Animation in the taskbar" and "Smooth edges of screen fonts". Your Windows will look slightly duller, but the computer will run faster.

March 2026

Contact me
To my Miscellaneous Page