There are a few things that will suck up your memory while booting up, the largest is your vid card, followed by some of the drivers that get loaded. If you have a 2 gig vid card, 2 gigs of your system memory get “stolen”. Its just a fact of life that's the way PC hardware works, the video memory is mirrored in the system memory, and while ugly, and hackish, it is the way things are done.
Think of it as the system draws on a whiteboard the same size and shape as your vid card has, but your vid card has to look at this whiteboard from outside the room, and copy the picture to its own whiteboard for you to see.
The next thing to take a look at is the following 3 views of the task manager. Note that on startup (from a fresh cold boot) I have almost 4 gig of memory in use, this is the single panel screen shot.
Now be sure to look at the second set of screen shots, note the button circled in red, click it to get the stuff that is “non user space” stuff, you should see LOCAL, SYSTEM, and NETWORK , with possibly some others.
The other thing to be aware of SI (1000x) units, vs "PC" units (1024x).
If you can show us the same 3 screen shots, we can get a better understanding of what is going on in your system.
-charles
Attachment 37810