My machine's about 6 years old, with 8GB of RAM and a max of 16GB. It runs a 2TB SATA HDD. Chrome has always been a hog, but it's only the last few days where it's actively sabotaged everything else.
I'll try and see if anything helps. But it may just be that I'll have to think about getting a new, more powerful PC. Which really sucks, because that's a huge expense at a time where I'm not super comfortable making it.
Right now my machine's sitting at 11.8G with 124 Chrome tabs, 50 Waterfox, 45 Firefox, along with EMClient, Kindle, two instances of Obsidian.md, three Cygwin terminals, Calibre (with 10 ebook windows open), Discord, and a bunch of other odds and ends, running on multiple monitors. And I haven't killed anything in a couple days.
To be fair, I'm on Win7 and I have no idea how much of a hog Win10 is. But my PC is
older than yours. So, unless you're using > 1/2 as much stuff as I am, I suspect the problems you're having with Chrome are being caused by something other than merely Chrome itself: i.e. either specific websites or apps you're using in Chrome that leak like crazy, issues with your tab discard configuration, or issues with your swap space/swap device.
And if you haven't replaced your hard drive in 6 years, it's probably swapping + the hard drive. The timing might be coincidental, or you might've been sitting close to the level where you would need swapping, and the recent update pushed things over the edge. When my machine hits 95-98% memory use it becomes unusable even with a
good hard drive, which is why I actively check my memory usage in the system task manager daily to see what app I should restart today to free up memory, so I never hit that 95% mark. With only 8GB, you're going to have to be a lot more proactive. (That being said, I have dozens of tabs open in Chrome on a 4GB Win7 laptop, but that's all I use it for so weekly-ish restarts of Chrome suffice.)
In short, you probably don't
need a new machine: going from 8GB to 16GB won't just double the performance, it will shoot it way up because your machine will stop swapping. A new hard drive is of comparable cost and if you just clone the old one to the new one, then it's of similar cost and both changes are a LOT less expensive than a new machine, not to mention a lot less time. If you're not comfortable with a screwdriver or plugging and unplugging cables inside a PC, you might need to find a friend or pay somebody, but it's still way less costly and time consuming than a new PC.
