Computers (in Off-topic)

What takes up RAM other than processes? I've added up the RAM usage of each process shown for *all* users manually and it comes out to about half the RAM that task manager shows me that is consumed.

I'm trying to make games perform better on my computer and eliminate unnecessary RAM usage since, well, it's unnecessary.

what are the numbers we are talking about here?

if you shut down the computer, restart and then check before running anything is it still off?

does it only happen after certain programs?

If you're running Windows 7, then almost-full RAM usage is normal. Still, try running anti-virus and anti-malware programs and check to see if you have programs running in the background that you don't need.

I have no idea how Windows manages its memory, but here on Linux data that's read from disk is also cached in memory, to speed things up. This means that currently my laptop has 3579 MB memory in use (out of 3903 MB), but only 1445 is actually in use by programs (including the 512 MB virtual machine I currently have running). The rest is in use as buffer or cache. I assume Windows knows the same trick?

bartjan@fenchurch:~$ free -m 
             total       used       free     shared    buffers     cached
Mem:          3903       3579        323          0        862       1271
-/+ buffers/cache:       1445       2457
Swap:         8191          6       8185

It's most likely the OS that's taking up the rest of the "used" RAM.

Pretty sure Windows does the same thing

If OS is taking RAM, what is the "System" process doing?

I'm sure this isn't a virus and the unseen RAM is always there.

Windows is doing a lot that task manager doesn't show you. You can get a much better picture, though, from the Performance tab than the Processes tab. The kernel has its own reserved chunk of space, the paging file has to be mapped into memory, the vcache takes up a lot of space (see bart's post.. yes, windows does it).. There's a lot going on.