One of our directors has a new laptop running Windows 7 Professional x64. The laptop has 4GB of ram. With just Outlook 2010, instant messenger, and firefox open to various websites, the laptop consumes almost the whole 4GB of ram. Is this normal? Is anyone else experiencing issues with Windows 7 randomly utilizing lots of RAM? I checked the processes and there doesn't to be a single culprit that's consuming loads of memory.

Operating system manages memory according to its need. High memory does not mean necessarily that there is something bad. In any case I recommend to use Process Explorer (Sysinternals) to dig deeper into memory redistribution http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb896653 Regards Milos