How much memory does Windows 7 64x use for itself?

Question

I'm generally very picky about what my computer does - I'm disabling a lot of stuff that I don't like (i.e., different MS office, nvidia, creative stuff that tries to autorun), I constantly monitor my computer for all sorts of misbehaving programs.

My AV of choice is Kaspersky and I think I'm pretty secure from viruses because I never visit fishy sites like poker/porn, and never install programs from unconfirmed sources.

However, I have just randomly checked and it seems that after I freshly start my PC, about 1.5GB of 8GB RAM is already used up! In the Task Manager, "all user's processes" ticked of course, top users are explorer.exe at 73MB, SQL Server at 51MB and dwm.exe at 28MB. I've manually calculated total amount for all processes that are running, and came to a number of less than 400MB (had to round up everything to count only megabytes).

So, is it true that the system itself uses 1.1GB? Because I've googled and people report their PC uses only ~500MB memory when just started.

If no specific information is available, maybe someone could give me advice about how to find out what else uses RAM (except what is listed in Task Manager)? So I could track whatever is hogging that gigabyte of RAM.

Solution

What windows does is the more RAM you have the more ram it uses (it uses a percentage of some sort). This is good because Windows can use this RAM to cache important programs and data to speed up your user experience. So yes Windows is using 1.1 GB of RAM, but this is completely normal and in fact you would actually have a problem if it wasn't using enough RAM. By the way, in task manager if you click show processes from all users in the processes tab you can see the resource usage of the Windows components too.

Comments

[David Marshall]

Use RAMMap from technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/ff700229 . You should be aware that Windows 7 will retain anything in physical memory if there is a possibility it will be used again until all your 8GB is used. This is much better for performance then having to read it from disk.

[afrazier]

SQL Server will use all the memory it can unless you've configured constraints on usage.

[Istrebitel]

I see, so what happens is Win7 sees I have 8Gb ram and hogs a gig just in case it might need it in the future, to speed up opening of new apps etc?

[Jabbath]

Pretty much, although it doesn't exactly hog it. It does actually use it.

[David Schwartz]

@Istrebitel Windows has two choices: use the memory or leave it free. Leaving it free means it's completely and totally wasted, so that's the worst possible choice. If you're thinking, "I want the memory free now so I can use it later", that's silly. You can use it now and use it later.