How does Excel, with a few relatively big 5MB spreadsheets open, use 2GB of RAM? Isn’t all the data it’ll ever need to process hundreds of times less than that?
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2 GB is typically the limit that [32-bit apps](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2_GB_limit) will have, and quite a number of programs and apps just outright reserve that amount when they start up.
Windows (or any operating system) can “manage” that, and on computers or devices that don’t have a lot of memory, it can pretend “here’s your 2 GB” but actually only 100 MB are in memory, the rest are on the disk as “cache” or as a temporary working file. If your system has plenty of memory though, it’s not a big deal to give the app or program access to the entire 2 GB it requested. RAM, after all, is just “working space”, like a whiteboard.
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