so, yeah as already told by many others here, 1GB RAM usage of win7 alone is normal, my win7 uses 1.8/4.0GB after PC start.
and btw, every gfx card uses a tiny bit of the system RAM, my 5870 uses about 1.7GB.
and to correctly check the RAM usage of games enable a OSD which shows you the usage in RT
Maybe I’m fighting against an unstoppable wave of opinion here, but I can promise you this is a sudden dip in performance for me 
But you might want to be a little more open-minded and at least CONSIDER that the issue (the freezing) MIGHT not be your ram…
Well sure. Any suggestions on what it might be?
doublepost to bump the thread, but now it idles at 40% used ram instead of ~60%
I CHANGED. NOTHING.
@____@
it’s already been suggested in this thread but have you tried switching the memory into another slot? Have you also tried running any mem tests?
the rams is in the other slot now, but, what kind of memory tests? I’ve never had to before.
p.s. Although I may not sound it, I am grateful for all the responses 
Buying new ram is not so bad, I bought new ram when my OCZ 2 gb wasn’t enough, i bought 4gb dual channel ddr2 800 from a black guy who jacked it from a car a few hours earlier, I paid 10$ canadian. Overclocked to 1000mhz 5-5-5-15 never had a crash.
Anyway to actually try to be helpful, you definitely have a hardware issue, video shared ram is usually still accessible by the OS when you’re not in a game, and windows usually shows only the amount installed (and not the useable amount like in your case)
Only sersoft…
do the memtest suggested a few posts above, and naturally if there are any problems you’d need to replace it.
It could be a problem with your graphics card (especially if it’s saying it’s got more memory than it does!), sounds like what happened to a mate of mine, the drivers for his graphics card got corrupted during install and for some reason it seemed to use the RAM instead of the graphics card’s memory, so basically all of the RAM is being used for the display instead of running your computer. This might be why it runs really slow with TF2, as all the memory is going on the graphics, but it’s still slow on the desktop, as it’s looking pretty but can’t process all the applications.
My thoughts exactly.
Anyway, I’ll run the memory tests 2morrow and get back to you guys
Didn’t get a chance to run the tests, sometime during the week.
I’d just like to point out that now I’m idling at 90% ram usage…@___@ random.
do the tests ASAP. they dont take more than 15 minutes IIRC.
DAMN
get a better taskmanager and try to find the application which uses so much RAM
try processexplorer it should be on the microsoft website
Okay I’ve got process explorer open, I don’t see much different from normal task manager.
p.s. I noticed I put everything on the main screen with the intention of cropping…but then forgot 