Five Chrome settings, several on by default, can use up memory and storage even after you close the browser. Changing them takes a few minutes.
If your PC feels slow or the fans keep spinning, Chrome may be the cause even when few tabs are open. A How-To Geek writer found that Chrome used gigabytes of memory for features he barely used, on a laptop with 16GB of RAM. Five settings are behind it, and each can be changed in Chrome's menus.
By default, Google turns on several tools meant to make Chrome feel fast and useful. They include on-device AI, background apps, page preloading, Memory Saver and background sync. The trade-off is that they use your computer's RAM, which is the short-term memory a PC uses to run programs. The writer spotted the drain in Windows Task Manager, which you can open with Ctrl + Shift + Esc.
Google recently added local AI tools to Chrome that summarize web content, organize tabs and detect scams. They run on your own hardware instead of a cloud server. If your PC meets the hardware requirements, Chrome can quietly download roughly 20GB of AI model data. That costs storage as well as memory, which matters if you do not use those features.
Turning off background sync will not break websites. They simply wait until you open the tab to fetch updates. Preloading is the one trade-off you will notice, since pages may feel a little less instant. If a few sites must stay loaded, Memory Saver has an exception list under Performance, in the "Always keep these sites active" section. The article describes one writer's experience, so results on your own PC may differ.
Open Chrome's Settings, then check System, Performance, Site settings and AI in Chrome to see which of these five settings are using your memory.
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