Where has my RAM gone?

You have selected the User tab in Task Manager which will only show you statistics for processes that are running as your user. You'll notice that the column header in your first screenshot says:

    27%
 Memory
-------
485.3MB

This does not mean that 485.3MB is 27% of your memory, but that your user account is using 485.3MB of memory and the total memory usage of your computer is 27%.

As you can see in this screenshot, I have changed the value (through Right-Click on the column header) to show Percent rather than Values, this shows that the total memory usage is 61% and my user profile is using 51%.

There are several other accounts that are not "Users" per se:

SYSTEM
LOCAL SERVICE
NETWORK SERVICE
etc.

All of these run processes, services, and drivers that require memory to function.

MarvinMcFly

Posted 2019-01-27T20:41:30.737

Reputation: 64

i don't have another user, trust me. and you can see the blank space beneath it, which indicates that there is no other users – Homam Gamer – 2019-01-27T21:22:31.590

3@HomamGamer sorry maybe I understand your question wrong or wasn’t clear enough. In the third screenshot the task manager shows that 2.2GB of 7.9GB are in use, which is about 28% of the installed RAM. This 2.2GB contains system processes, user processes and etc. In the first screenshot you see that your user uses about 500MB of RAM. In Detail: All processes owned by this user allocated 500MB RAM. The above shown 27% are related to current allocated RAM of all processes. As I mentioned in the beginning maybe I understand your question wrong, in this case sorry for the confusion. – MarvinMcFly – 2019-01-27T21:32:20.573

when "my user" is using more than 500mb, like now it's 2gb, the memory usage is 50%, so i don't think that it has to do with system processes or anything, it just acts like i have only 4gb of ram, at least for this user, where is the other 4? – Homam Gamer – 2019-01-27T21:40:03.993

2Actually, it has everything to do with system processes. – Daniel B – 2019-01-28T06:35:20.017

1You hit the nail on the head with this answer, just not hard enough to drive it home. I've fleshed it out a bit to show the reasoning behind the answer. – Michael Frank – 2019-01-28T06:48:40.183

This is actually the correct answer. Windows processes have an owner: the user that initiated the process and whose rights/credentials are used by the process. The other users" mentioned in this answer are invisible system users that windows uses to run background system processes under. The 485MB you're looking at only include the processes that run under your name. – BloodPhilia – 2019-01-28T07:05:56.517

click the Details tab and you'll see a lot of users there – phuclv – 2019-01-28T07:17:38.240

thanks for the the help guys, still, windows is using a lot of my ram behind my back, guess i have no choice oter than buying 8gb more. – Homam Gamer – 2019-01-28T22:15:54.660

2Why do you think you need to buy more? You have almost 6 GB available! – Jamie Hanrahan – 2019-01-29T11:48:20.557

you're using only 27% of the total memory. Why do you thing it's not enough? – phuclv – 2019-01-30T14:59:04.723

Where has my RAM gone?

Answers