Idle PC RAM usage?

I have 2 gigs of ram, but I've noticed that even without a browser/active program My computer is using about 400-500k of ram. Is this normal? Do things disable when I'm playing a game, etc? Or is this ram pretty much useless?

You can easily use that much ram if you lots of stuff running in the background.

Running bloated apps like Norton's, having spyware/adware, etc. all contribute.

Windows Task Manager --> Processes

That should show how the available memory is used.

By the way, 400-500k is nothing.

I'm going to assume you mean 400-500MB, not KB. And yes, this does sound excessive - you probably have some utilities and/or spyware that are hogging your memory. Anything you see residing in the system tray is another program resident in memory.

Regarding if this memory is "useless"... Windows is also pretty good about figuring out which apps are actively needing memory and which are not. That's the purpose of a swap file - generally speaking, if Guild Wars (or some other game or application) needs RAM that has been allocated by some other process, Windows will try to swap the inactive application's memory to disk, thereby freeing up memory for the active program.

However, because the hard drive is so much slower than memory, this can cause performance degradation. This is why having a lot of RAM in your system can improve performance - it prevents the need for swapping memory to disk when multiple programs are trying to allocate memory.

BTW, you can bring up Process Manager by pressing Ctrl-Shift-Esc. Click on the Processes Tab, and Click on Mem Useage to sort by this field (clicking repeatedly reverses sort order). If you're not sure what a process is (Image Name field) - just Google it to find out.

if you post a few screenshots of processes ill take a look for you. also, What operating system are you using ?

Yes that is what I meant. A quarter of my 2 gigs.

As far as I can tell, it's not spyware. I've three different Anti-spyware/adware programs that I run on a regular basis. And I use Zone Alarm Firewall (that as far as I've read is a good one). My anti-virus isn't supposed to be reasource intensive (Kaspersky). I googled through the list of processes, and apart from Google Desktop, My antivirus, my firewall, and a bizillion processes that we're labeled as "essential for the stability of your computer", there's nothing else I can find to cut out. I've tried running it with and without Google desktop, but it really doesn't make much of a difference.

I did notice that a number of Processes were on the list twice (or four-five times, like Svchost.exe) I'm not sure if that's significant or not?