cpu at 0% windows still using 1 gig ram?

Are you sure it's all RAM or does that include the page file? Either way, Windows memory management will always use RAM before virtual memory when it's available including caching frequently used data such as OS libraries and prefetch lists. It does this for the best possible performance. For the most part, it's an applications responsibility to request Windows to allocate more RAM for better performance, however, that practice is normally only utilized by work related applications like 3D engineering modelers.

In reality, we as humans cannot efficently compete with the complex algorithms used by memory managers and it's best to just leave it alone.

Even though you have a lot of RAM, it is highly recommended to have a page file as well. It doesn't have to be very large but it should go on a separate drive if you have one. On my system for example which is very old comparatively, Intel Pentium 4 dual core with 2GB RAM, I have one page file on the C drive of 64MB and 512MB on another drive. I use 3D modeling software, have Outlook running and listen to music and rarely use more than 350MB of virtual memory and it performs quite well. The link below is to a page file monitor that you can use to tune the page file for best performance. This is for XP but if you have Windows7 there is a page file monitor built in already.

http://billsway.com/notes_public/WinXP_Tweaks/