What's using up my RAM?

[kLN93]

I have Windows 7 Home Premium, doesn't really bother me that 1.5GB-2GB is being used up because I have 8GB RAM. Just curious about what's using it up. Take a look at the screenshots

 

[Barman58]

Nothing I can see looks out of place - Win7 is designed to use more of your free RAM when idle that previous versions of the OS, especially XP.

The RAM is cached for use by windows services in a preemptive manner, and RAM in use by the system, in this way, will be released for use by any program that requires it.

The built in memory management in win7 is far more reliable than anything used previous and works on the principle that unused ram is wasted ram - why pay money for something that is not used

 

[LMiller7]

I see nothing unusual.
Adding up the numbers in the process memory usage column rarely produces meaningful information. To start with the numbers don't represent complete memory usage of a process. There are also multiple and major users of memory that are not processes. These include the file cache, the non paged pool, the resident portion of the paged pool, etc., most of which are not shown in Task Manager. Memory usage in a modern OS is very complex and cannot be accounted for by simply adding up a series of numbers.