25% RAM usage while idle. (16GB) Help!

[xxdanxs]

I have 16GB DDR3 RAM (2 x 8GB). When my PC is idling, my RAM usage is at around 22% - 25% usage or about 3.5GB - 4.0GB used. Also when I am just using Google Chrome it goes up to 28% - 30% usage or 4.5GB used. I am running Windows 7. Nothing extremely intensive is running in the background.

Help please! Thanks!

 

[Rookie_MIB]

Just out of curiosity, is it affecting your usage of the computer? Had an odd situation with Firefox a year or two ago running on an older box (Intel C2D with 2gb ram) - it would have a memory leak situation where Firefox would start locking chunks of memory until the computer was completely unusable due to zero memory available.

Yes, locking open 4gb of memory seems like a lot, but the memory manager in Win7 is pretty good, and it's only using a quarter of what you have. Unless it starts locking open bigger chunks and creating performance problems, I wouldn't worry too much about it. If you want to check your usage (as in what programs are using what memory):

Right click on the taskbar, select 'start task manager'
Go to the 'processes' tab
Click on the 'memory' header - it will sort by memory usage

use that to see what is locking up the most memory. Perhaps some programs are running which are unnecessary at startup and you can disable them (and that would be a whole different post).

 

[neon neophyte]

your system is supposed to leave things it uses in ram. that is what it is there for. what good is 16gb if your operating system won't use it? why are you even worried about it?

 

[BPTMatthew]

Windows uses more RAM if there is more available. 25% usage is about right with nothing running and that much RAM.

 

[Spectre694]

Chrome uses a lot of memory that is one of the ways that it speeds itself up.

 

[wanderer11]

Look in task manager>processes. Is anything using a lot of RAM that shouldn't be? Windows uses more if it's available. Chrome can use a lot. Like everyone else said you bought the RAM so it could be used.

 

[ngbeslhang]

I don't think this will affect your usage because you had 16GB of RAM, but if you do mind press Ctrl + Alt + Delete at a same time and choose Task Manager, you can check anything that uses your CPU, RAM, hard drive and more.