1.30 gb of ram used up

Ok so i have a dell inspiron 1545 and its been running pretty good for the time ive had which is around 2 years but lately last month ive noticed its become very slowly and laggy, here is a a list of things that my pc is doing very slow:
* right click on something e.g a folder or a video or something like that would take forever to open up the right click pop up menu.
* i can't you to different browsers open for e.g i have firefox and chrome open and both of them would lag , before i never had this problem.
*opening windows expoler would take forever to open and then its just loading it very slowly and laggy and takes forever to close it to.
*just opening my computer takes forever i click it and it reacts after like 20 secs and opens it.

So here are my problems i have 2gb of ram and 1.30 gb of ram is used up , and sometimes when i have firefox and chrome my memory usage goes up to 1.60 gb and this just freeze up my pc and i can't do anything and then my pc usage goes up to 90% and causes me more problems.
Can some one tell me whats going wrong here?? i have no idea what could be causing this. please help!
Thanks in advance.

here is a picture of my ram being used up and ive noticed that my cpu usage is not steady it goes to 20 then 6 and then 14 and then 1%

Here are the applications i am running and nothing big , just day to day software i am running

2gb is a bit low, if you can max your ram. Open task manager, check the box "Show processes for all users", then click on Processes tab and click on Memory column header to arrange processes in descending/ascending order of usage. Identify the top 5, let us know.

Also run maintenance stuff- clean out junk with CCleaner (both regular and registry clean), run a malware scan with malwarebytes and defrag. If over the years you've added apps, then check whether you need all of them. Update windows and update all drivers.

89 processes in a 2 gig system. You need to trim down.

Bill2 said:

2gb is a bit low, if you can max your ram. Open task manager, check the box "Show processes for all users", then click on Processes tab and click on Memory column header to arrange processes in descending/ascending order of usage. Identify the top 5, let us know.

Also run maintenance stuff- clean out junk with CCleaner (both regular and registry clean), run a malware scan with malwarebytes and defrag. If over the years you've added apps, then check whether you need all of them. Update windows and update all drivers.

the processes running now that use the most are:
skype.exe
chrome.exe
chrome.exe
chrome.exe
chrome.exe
MsMpEng.exe

and i will run a malware scan and defrag , but do you mind telling me how to defrag??
and i just ran ccleaner today and no different

Thanks for the help. hopefully you can help me

Click on Start orb-All programs-Accessories-SystemTools-Disk defragmenter.

Skype and chrome are, well, skype and chrome. Msmpeng is microsoft security essentials. You may need to control startup processes. Click on Start orb, type MSCONFIG, hit Enter. Click on the Startup tab and uncheck anything you dont need starting at boot. E.g. I have only the antivirus, the touchpad driver and the password manager set at startup. It varies but try to trim that list and you'll see a reduction in the no. of running processes.

Bill2 said:

89 processes in a 2 gig system. You need to trim down.

Ive run more processes than this so i am not sure thats the case

ringo14 said:

Bill2 said:

89 processes in a 2 gig system. You need to trim down.

Ive run more processes than this so i am not sure thats the case

Its not so much about the number. The fact is they are using up almost 70% ram.

To add to Bill2's comments: I agree with trimming your startup programs. I've got my antivirus (MSE) and touchpad enabled at startup. Everything else is disabled. If you have CCleaner installed, look under Tools. There's a startup section that lets you disable whatever. General rule of thumb is if you don't need it immediately at startup you can disable until actually needed. This should help with the lagging.

CCleaner - Screenshots