More of an observation than a question.. My ten year old Win 7 Pro desktop has been getting a bit sluggish lately. Turns out it's Sidebar.exe hogging all my spare RAM. I've got 4 Gigs installed and Sidebar.exe was using up to 3 Gigs of it.
I didn't notice that though until, for the first time ever, I got a small popup window telling me that it was using lots of RAM and asking if I wanted to shut it down. It's related to desktop gadgets.. I only have two small ones, a weather forecaster and a tiny network throughput monitor.
Anyway I shut it down and then restarted it as suggested and it's back to what's normal using around 35K of memory. Doing google searches it seems this specific memory leak has been an issue with Win 7 and sidebar for years.
Now that I'm home all the time self isolating I'm not turning my computer off every day and just putting it to sleep when I'm not using it so I'm guessing that was/is the cause of the problem. I'll just have to turn it off more often to reset/clear RAM useage.
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How to recognize suspicious variants of sidebar.exe?
If you want to retain Windows Sidebar, then there are ways to help you look out for any suspicious elements that might have trespassed into it. Following are the possible scenarios:
Search for sidebar.exe in a subfolder of the user’s profile. If the process doesn’t contain any information about the developer, then it is not a Windows core process. Delete it instantly.
If sidebar.exe is located in the Temp folder and it doesn’t include a description, get rid of it!
If the program is available in the Windows directory (C:\Windows), then it is not an official Windows program. Get an antivirus program to scan it properly, as deleting from this folder can lead to corruption in the entire OS.
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fink, maybe you just need more that 4GB ram. I'm running 16GB on my Windows 7 Pro. But then I don't use the sidebar, could never figure out why I needed it.
I had 8 Gigs on this PC for a while but switched out to put it on my media server which needed it more. The memory leak would have eventually used it all up anyway.. just would have taken longer.
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Originally Posted by fink
I browse, email and use MSpaint once in a while so I don't need a ton of RAM.
With what you don't do on the machine, 4GB is plenty enough. I might add, my Windows 7 isn't 10 years old, I just built it in November 2018. And it's my main computer.
There are weather skins, but it depends on which source you are using. I had to modify mine after Weather.com took down their WXDATA feed. https://visualskins.com/tag/weather/