I have usually three Chrome windows with plenty of tabs open. I monitor this now for a while with having the task manager open as well. Once in a while one tab just loads up enormous amounts of memory, 500 kB sometimes. I end this process then and one tab shows after the "He's Dead" message. I reload it and everything is back to normal.

What I also notice is that once in a while windows dumps a lot of memory, around 500 MB in one go, and the system is running faster after. The dump process however, takes a whhile to complete and brings the computer to a standstill. I cannot see any improvement of the individual processes in the task manager between before and after the dump process in terms of memory usage.

Also notice a lot of HDD activity and the machine is rather hot.

Windows 7 Ultimate on an Acer Laptop with 4 MB RAM.

That's not right at all. You could try reinstalling the browser, and perhaps installing process explorer to see what's going on in the background. Sounds to me like something's been corrupted or is not functioning properly.

Chrome does use up more resources than a lot of browsers, but your system should be able to cope more than adequately.

The problem may be with other programs/add-ons you have running in the background...some of those little programs that startup automatically when turning on the computer...the ones that usually have a icon in the lower right hand corner of your taskbar. Maybe one of those programs is using a lot of memory/causing data dumps to the hard drive on occasions but it's Chrome that reacts to the low memory issue.

I use to run a little program called NetWorx in the background which monitors your bandwidth activity/usage...I had been running it for a few months but about a month ago I noticed my Norton 360 Firewall/AntiVirus started giving me a High CPU usage and disk activity warning on occasions while browsing, but didn't identify the program causing the issue.

Tried disabling/enabling the various background applications/add-ons I run...turns out it was the NetWorx program which must have changed how it worked in a recent upgrade. Once I set NetWorx not to run in the background all the time my problem went away. I'm running Win 7 Home Premium and IE9 with 4Gb RAM. You might want to disable some of your add-ons/background programs one at time to see what happens.

I had Chrome installed as a backup browser...my primary browser is IE..specifically IE9 now. But I removed Chrome this morning because every few days my Norton 360 FireWall/AntiVirus would give me a "High CPU Usage" warnings with Chrome identified as the user. I had been ignoring this for months because the High CPU Usage would go away after a few seconds. I run a Dual Core Intel CPU with 4GB RAM on Win7. And this would happen even Chrome was not running/just have the Desktop open and not running any program yet other than some small startup programs a person sees running/their icons in the lower right hand corner/task bar of the Windows screen. Apparently Chrome loads/keeps some stuff running in the background during computer startup even if you don't have it open. But for me Chrome is now gone.