The Performance tab in Windows Task Manager will show you how much of your RAM is actually being used.
Here is an example from my computer, with Outlook open, and several open tabs in Google Chrome:
As you can see, I am currently using less than half of my 16 GB of RAM, so I am in good shape.
On the other hand, here is what I see on a computer with only 4 GB of RAM, with Outlook and Chrome open:
You can immediately see that a very high percentage of the RAM is in use on this computer. That’s a sign that this computer could use more RAM. However, you might now be wondering why one computer is using 6.6 GB of RAM to do pretty much the same thing the other computer is doing, while using only 3.5 GB of RAM. Here’s where things get a bit more complicated.
Windows uses something called Virtual Memory. This is a method where Windows divides up the available RAM among the many processes running in the system. It keeps things in RAM when they are actively being used, and moves things out of RAM and onto the disk when they are not actively being used, in order to free up RAM for other things that are actively being used. The less RAM you have available, the more time Windows spends moving things back and forth from RAM to disk and from disk back to RAM. This is what really slows things down when you don’t have enough RAM. You can see how much of a problem this is by using Resource Monitor:
The column “Hard Faults/sec” under the Memory section of Resource Monitor shows how frequently processes are looking for some data to be in RAM, only to find that the needed data has been moved out of RAM and onto the disk. Every time there is a hard fault, the running process has to stop and wait for Windows to make room in RAM, by moving some other data out of RAM, and then move the needed data back into RAM from the disk, before the process can continue. If you constantly see a high rate of Hard Faults/sec, you can tell for sure that your computer is being slowed down by insufficient RAM.
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