Hey can someone explain this Windows task manager RAM stuff?

Hi,

"Total" is the amount of memory that the motherboard firmware (BIOS/UEFI) has made available to the operating system. Assuming no faulty or incompatible hardware, this value will be equal to the total amount of installed memory less the amount of memory reserved by hardware. In your case you have 8GiB of installed memory (8192 MiB) less 8174 MiB available to the operating system yields 18MiB of memory reserved for hardware. This amount is usually quite small (< 20 MiB) and is independent of memory allocated by drivers for hardware usage.

"Cached/Standby" is the amount of memory that is being used by the operating system as a soft page cache. Memory is a use-it-or-lose-it commodity, it doesn't make sense to have memory doing absolutely nothing. To make the best use of it the operating system will fill memory that is not allocated to the kernel, drivers, services, or applications with data that might be useful to them. This can help speed up load times and reduce hard disk thrashing. Over time almost all "Free" memory will end up as "Cached" and as an application needs additional memory it will be pulled from either one of these two pools.

"Available" is the amount of memory that is available for application usage. It is equal to the sum of "Cached" and "Free" less some amount which must remain free.

"Free" is the amount of memory that is not currently doing anything. Over time it will be filled with cached data.

There are also a few more that are worth mentioning

"Modified" is memory that contains modified disk data that must be written back to the disk before it can be used for another purpose. This will happen over time or whenever the PC is shutdown/rebooted

"Paged Pool" is the paged section of kernel and driver memory. It behaves very similar to application memory in that infrequently used memory may be swapped to a hard disk.

"Non-Paged Pool" is the non-paged section of kernel and driver memory. Memory allocated from this pool will persist in memory until it is deallocated. It will never be swapped to a hard disk. This is essential for proper operation of interrupt service routines and deferred procedure calls.