Windows 10: Memory compression seems to be disabled - should I enable it?

Hi,

I'm currently doing some maintenence on a friends laptop. I've upgraded the RAM and am also going to put an SSD in there which should dramatically improve performance. (It's only a Celeron!)

Thing is I've noticed that in Task Manager under the Performance tab and Memory, it always says "0MB" compressed. I've never seen it say this on Windows 10 before.

Is this likely disabled by Windows due to the processor limitations, or has it been disabled some way accidentally?

Also if possible to enable it, would you recommend doing so? I've boosted the RAM from 6GB to 12 but wondering if it will improve performance if it stops disk activity with paging. I know in theory it should be doing this less with double the RAM but I just don't know if the compressed memory seemingly being off is causing any slowdowns.

Thanks




:)

 

'System and compressed memory' on ASUS G75VY notebook load CPU always on 16%

thank you for your reply!

here what I did:

1. disabled non-microsoft services, disabled all applications in startup list

result: after restart "system and compressed memory" still gain 17% CPU

2. ran PC into safe mode ( just to see what happens )

result: CPU load is 0% for "system and compressed memory"

3. ran PC in normal mode

result: CPU load is 0% for "system and compressed memory"

as we can see from step 1, the problem probably is not in applications ?

what would you suggest in this case ?

looking forward for your answer

 

How to enable memory compression Windows 10

Memory compression is enabled by default. However, it appears for whatever reason, you currently have it disabled. Within a Administrator PowerShell command prompt type the following command to disable memory compression

Disable-MMAgent -MemoryCompression





Within a Administrator PowerShell command prompt type the following command to enable memory compression

Enable-MMAgent -MemoryCompression





Sources:

• Enable-MMAgent
  
• Disable-MMAgent
  

 

Is it ok if I disable Windows 10 memory compression?


If I enable memory compression (via the mmagent cmdlet in powershell) I get this "error" in process explorer about a process called "memory compression" and the path reads "[a device attached to the system is not functioning.]":





When I try to access any kind of information on it via properties settings, which there is none, it says "Access Is Denied" the only info I can see is threads tab that shows "ntoskrnlGetCompressionWorkspace" error.


Anyways, if I disable memory compression via the mmagent cmdlet in powershell, I no longer get the "error" in process explorer! The image below shows that memory compression is disabled with its "False" value:





But the other features having "True" values show that superfetch/prefetch is currently enabled. Normally superfetch enables memory compression by default when superfetch is on, until I manually disabled memory compression.


Suppose Superfetch (and memory compression) was enabled before then I disabled the Superfetch service in Service Manager, well this is what the mmagent cmdlet in Powershell looks like.



With Superfetch disabled, it also disables memory compression.


Currently, I have enabled Superfetch but since I manually disabled memory compression it stayed disabled. Otherwise, memory compression would have been automatically enabled alongside the Superfetch features. I am having no issues other than that annoying "error" description in process explorer. My pagefile size is managed by windows if this matters at all.