This is normal for windows 7, it uses the memory in order to prevent un needed read/writes from the drive. This is actually something you want with a laptop because unless you have a solid state drive, laptop drives are traditionally very slow.
I don't understand why people get so upset when their memory is actually being used, that's what it is there for.
If you open a large program that requires more resources windows will unload nonessential processes from memory to the pagefile while that program is active.
Windows 7 is much better at managing memory than it's predecessors.
1 gig of used ram is pretty much expected.
This is why 1 gig is the minimum required per microsoft's specifications.