The amount of RAM or the physical memory present in your computer system is very critical to the its performance. The more physical memory you install in your system, the better would be the performance give by computer. This is why more and more people are choosing to have RAM of the order of 8GB and 16GB on their systems. But just having a big RAM bank does not guarantee a sudden improvement in the efficiency of your system. There are programs like Mozilla Firefox which keep on increasing their memory consumption until you restart them. You also have to see whether some programs are acting as memory hogs and consuming disproportionate amount of RAM to make you system rather unstable and unresponsive.
While the Task Manager in Windows can give you some idea about the memory consumption of various programs, the information provided by it is very basic and limited. The free tool called RamMap designed by Mark Russinovich of Sysinternals/Microsoft can give you full details about how the RAM in your Windows computer is being consumed, by which processes and which physical ranges of the memory are currently in use.
Like all the other tools of Sysinternals, RamMap is also a fully portable tool. It works with Windows Vista, 7 and 8. As you launch RamMap, it will show you some graphical details in the first tab Use Counts which lists the memory usage summary by type and paging list.
The second tab, Processes shows the private and paging memory used by various processes being run on your system. The tabs Physical Ranges and Physical Pages give you an idea about the actual location on the RAM that is in use. The tabs File Summary and File Details show you which files are loaded into the RAM by various programs.
There is no auto-refresh feature in RamMap. You have to press the F5 key on your keyboard to see the current status of the RAM usage. You can also save the current state of the RAM for later analysis into RMP files.
Conclusion: RamMap gives your intricate details about how the RAM modules in your system are being used by the Windows operating system and other processes. This can be used to see whether your system is in need of a memory upgrade or not.
You can download RamMap from http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/ff700229.aspx.