Re: New laptop, but my RAM Usage is constantly over 1GB! please help!
Task Manager looks normal.
You have to understand that memory usage in Windows is highly dynamic. You might look at the "Available" memory of 1511MB and assume that this is all that applications can use. Wrong, not even close. The memory manager assigns RAM to applications according to both need and availability. On bootup you will find processes using a great deal of memory, simply because there is currently no better use for it. Windows hates free memory and will always try to find some use for it, even if it is only of trivial value. Any use of memory, almost any use at all, is better than letting it sit idle. But never fear, when you start a new application memory will be quickly reassigned as needed. The memory manager always tries to assign memory where it will do the most good to improve performance.
The large majority of memory marked "Available" is not free. It is in use but can be quickly reassigned when needed. In Vista and Windows 7 a large part of this "available" memory will be used by Superfetch.
The memory manager in Windows 7 is the result of an enormous amount of research and testing over many years. In the large majority of cases it works very well.
The source for this is "Windows Internals" 5th edition, a Microsoft publication. This is not light reading.
