Windows 10 Notepad.exe taking up Ram

Neemobeer

Cloud Security Engineer

Staff member

Joined

Jul 4, 2015

Messages

8,998

• Dec 14, 2018

• #2

Some things of note. Typically there will be an expander arrow since notepad always opens a document. Also the memory usage is pretty high unless a document is open. You could use Process Explorer to verify it's the real notepad in the correct location and do a Virus Total submission from process explorer as well as see if it has any open handles to files.

 

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Solution

Neemobeer

Cloud Security Engineer

Staff member

Joined

Jul 4, 2015

Messages

8,998

• Dec 14, 2018

• #3

I was able to replicate this behavior as follows

• Open a PowerShell console
• Run the following Start-Process -FilePath C:\Windows\Notepad.exe -WindowStyle Hidden (This creates a child notepad process to the powershell process)
• Close the PowerShell console (Killing the parent process leaves the orphaned notepad process)

My theory is that something opened a document with notepad and then the application that opened notepad was closed.

 

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