Just rebooted.. nothing running, windows claims I'm using 99% memory, but task manager shows 211MB of 16GB being the most in use

May i suggest the never before suggested path of a unix system?

Someone smarter than me suggested it might be a hyperv vm that had started up.. and that was the problem (I thought I had deleted it). Damn sneaky thing.

Now I'm kinda sad that I don't need to try linux again.. but backing everything up is a pain

So, I have listened to the mermaid. But this time, I installed it on my OLD(=not primary) laptop - it had a win7 licence, but it is no longer supported anyway.. and I have a new toy and potentially a home media server :)

@atombomb I do that, but then just never use it enough to get a sense of purpose. Dual boot is an option I suppose