hello.
chrome and youtube in turn use a lot of ram. so if they all are open it's natural for it to be full.
in fact myne is 3.11 GB full right now even though I'm only typing here.
for managing you're startup items, go to task manager if you;re using windows 10, there is a tab called startup in there. and if you are using windows 7 open run and type,
"msconfig".
in windows 10 you must press application on each startup item you want to disable and press disable. and with windows 7, just uncheck the items you don't want, press OK and restart.
if you are using any system maintenance programs, it may be the culprit that uses your ram. try to configure it better.
if you didn't update your windows in a while, do so. it may have a fix that uses the system resources more efficiently.
finally, scan your computer for viruses. it's unlikely, but it may be a malware that uses up you're resources.
hope these help, good luck.

That's correct, and you don't have any choice but to upgrade.  Windows itself uses around 1 GB, browser tabs will use anywhere from 20MB to 100MB, NVDA grabs a good chunk, if you've got Dropbox going that'll grab another 30 or 40 MB from time to time, etc.  There's a reason so many of us consider 8 GB the minimum nowadays.

You didn't wanna hear that 4GB might not be enough, now you're seeing the proof. The more you do at once, the more it's going to eat into that. Keep browser tabs to a minimum, keep programs that don't need to be running closed,etc.

chrome is generaly a resource eating program. You should use other browsers like firefox,, especially because chrome also has the habit to start nasty resource grabbing programs in the background and don't close them even when chrome gets closed. And let me guess you have 4gigs and 2 cores? My old laptop had the same stats and it worked pritty good for what it was. I have learned that in most cases looking in the ram or the cpu usage doesn't have much to say, for me i always look how the performance goes and if it sucks i sort processes after ram and look what eats ram. I use classic taskmgr btw, donno if that is possible in new one.

I don't think firefox does the whole, "Let's just launch 16 random extra processes just because we can", thing. That said, I'm not a fan of the browser. It fell out of favor since about 45 or so. A shame really, because I used it from 3.6 on until then but after that, I couldn't deal with it anymore.

There's no magical thing you can do man. Either try to manage your resources or upgrade the RAM. memory's fairly cheap.

@ironcross, it wasn't that I didn't want to hear it, it's simply that the computer worked fine at the time and now is working fine again.

The next time I get a laptop or PC, I'll look into getting 8 gigs of ram but for now; I'm ok with what I've got.

Having an ssd makes it so I can restart my system very quickly if I have to.

@everyone else, thanks for your help, I disabled quite afew programs so hopefully that helps.

Oh by the way, I'm using firefox and have been using it for quite afew years.

You probably know what i'll say now. I want you to guess. I give you 10 seconds. In the next line you're going to have the proper post. Drum roll...
Switch to linux! I mean, linux is amazing and its free and its great and everything.
Honestly i need to say linux some times runs worse on this pc than windows does, but it works. I use manjaro with the latest stable kernel and lts also installed.
I dont have problem with proprietary software, so i dont have a problem with windows, but linux is cool and i'd recommend trying it.
I personally use mate but i know a visually inpaired guy that uses arch with I3 and a xfce application launcher and as far as i know it works fine so why not try it

I don't think linux runs worse, I think the accessibility stuff makes it appear that way, and I really... really really really wish that would change. Speech dispatcher is just not up to the job.