Troubleshooting RAM Recognition Issues: A Personal Experience

As technology enthusiasts, we all expect our systems to perform flawlessly, but occasionally, we encounter perplexing issues. Today, I want to share my recent experience regarding an anomaly with my computer’s memory usage that led to some unexpected bottlenecks.

While rendering a video and listening to music on YouTube, I noticed that the audio was frequently buffering, which prompted me to investigate the cause. Initially, I suspected that high GPU utilization was to blame; however, further examination revealed that the real culprit was my RAM usage.

To my surprise, Task Manager was only recognizing 8 GB of my RAM, even though my system displayed a total of 15.5 GB as “usable” out of the 16 GB installed. This unexpected discrepancy caught my attention—how could 3.4 GB of memory usage be reported as “39%” of my total available memory?

Curious to understand the issue better, I took a screenshot of Task Manager and the “About my PC” section, which illustrated this puzzling situation: View Screenshot.

It’s worth noting that while engaging in other memory-intensive tasks, such as video editing, my sequencer seamlessly handled 8 GB of video files, and the system operated without any significant issues. This led me to question why I was experiencing these buffering problems during different activities.

If you’ve encountered similar issues or have insights into why Task Manager might misrepresent RAM usage, I would greatly appreciate your thoughts or advice. Troubleshooting memory problems can be tricky, but sharing experiences often leads to solutions. Let’s dive into this together!