Pretty bog standard machine here. AMD Athlon 64 processor, 2GB of single
channel DDR 160MHz memory, couple of hard drives etc. Running Windoze 7
Ultimate 64 bit (not my choice, put on there by my lad, when he built the
machine).

In all general respects, it works just fine. But it has this really annoying
thing of clogging up its memory over a few days. Normally, this machine is
never turned off, as was also the case with its predecessor, which ran all
sorts of Windoze versions over the years that I used it, ending with XP Pro.
There was never any problem with memory clogging on that machine. This one,
however, starts off, after a clean boot, showing about 35% memory in use at
idle. There are a few 'background' progs running, such as a clock
synchronizer and a weather monitor, and Thunderbird as a mail client, anti
virus etc, so I guess that 35% is reasonable. But over the course of a few
days, the amount in use creeps up and up until you reach around 90% usage
with the same background progs running, and it otherwise idling. I have
tried a number of memory 'cleaner' programs and the best I have found to
date is one called simply "CleanMem". It claims to do a genuine job of
clearing unused crap out of the memory that's been left behind, unlike other
cleaners which it says work by fooling the system in some way by filling the
memory with zeros or some such. I'm not really au fait enough with the
workings of computers to understand just what it was saying, but suffice to
say that it does seem to work better than the others I've tried. But even
that one seems unable to recover the situation beyond about 75% usage. The
only way to get the memory back, and thus recover the speed of the machine,
is to do a "Restart", which is a royal pain in the arse.

So, is this just a poor characteristic of 7 that previous versions of
Windoze didn't suffer from ? Does anyone else have a similar problem, or
have found a way to resolve it ? Not looking for a long drawn-out discussion
on this - I can live with it. Just interested to see if anyone better
qualified at this sort of thing than me, has a definitive answer.

Arfa