This is not exactly a “Mundane Pointless” item, but I couldn’t figure where else to put it.
I have a Dell Computer, with Windows 7 (with all the upgrades) and 8 gigs of RAM. Yesterday I got a message that memory was low, and I’d better free up some. They weren’t kidding, as the computer immediately was slowed down until it was basically unusable. After restarting several times, I was able to open a program “System Explorer” that shows the memory usage of all programs currently running (there are a lot!). Anyway, it found the culprit - a part of the Malwarebytes suite of software, named “MBAMService.exe” was using over 6 gigs of memory instead of its normal 279,000 K of memory. Additionally, I was unable to either kill the process or delete the program, receiving an “access denied” message whenever this was tried.
I was able to get things running again by using my goto solution to most problems, the “System Restore” routine, and that fixed the problem, with all running OK now.
I have noticed that Malwarebytes is a program that is often mentioned here as a good defense against malware, but that it had spectacularly failed in this case. I was wondering if any of you folks had run into this problem, and what your solution had been.
I recommend that you update Malwarebytes. From BleepingComputer.com, “An update pushed by Malwarebytes today for their Malwarebytes Anti-Malware product has caused a lot of problems for those who use their program. This new protection update caused mbamservice.exe to consume a lot of memory and upwards to 90% of the computer’s CPU. A new update has been pushed that resolves these issues.” That was posted yesterday.
I couldn’t get to task manager so I rebooted, then same thing happened, so next reboot I brought up task manager and left it running sorted by mem. I noticed the malwarebytes icon in the lower right like it ws trying to do something, but it never used up too much mem once task mgr was visible to me.
I did not do a restore and it has not happened again.
These are the things I did that I thought might have allowed something to get in:
1 - Went to Forbes.com for an article and turned off adblock plus for that site
2 - Downloaded an open source html editor 2 weeks ago (bluegriffon)
3 - Downloaded an open source graphics engine 2 weeks ago (jmonkeyengine)
Did you do anything recently similar to any of these?