Over half of my memory being used up constantly

[Arkius]

I've been noticing a lot of games aren't running as well as they should be on my PC, so I checked task manager and looked into it. With every single program but task manager and skype closed, i'm using 53% of my 8 GB of ram. I really don't understand this, as nothing should be taking up nearly that much of it. Nothing abouve 150 MB (skype) shows up on the task manager. Any possible causes?

 

[samucaninja]

Hi Arkius,
I have windows 7 with skype, steam, chrome and norton internet security running, together with windows services.
With 16GB of RAM, the task manager shows 4GB been utilized.

 

[Arkius]

Hi Arkius,
I have windows 7 with skype, steam, chrome and norton internet security running, together with windows services.
With 16GB of RAM, the task manager shows 4GB been utilized.

After restarting my computer, usage went down to a solid 32 percent without programs running. There was a problem, but restarting fixed it. Thanks for the input though!