Laptop has two gigabytes of Hardware Reserved ram, how to fix?

I ll list my computer details at the bottom. I m running Windows 7. My computer used to run fairly well. When I first bought it I could run minecraft, chrome, and Office at the same time with no problem.

In the last month or so (I ve been using it only two days a week lately) I have noticed it s been very slow. So I looked at my resource manager. I have 4 gigs of ram on this machine, which is what it came with. Out of that four gigs of ram, 2.3 gigs is used up by "Hardware Reserved" and a couple hundred megabytes is in standby. This leaves me with 1.7 or so "free" ram, but nearly all of that is used up just idling.

I ve googled the issue and can t seem to find a fix. I ve even gone so far as to do a full factory reset, and it hasn t improved (and now I m dealing with a background windows update that I can t stop on top of it).

What can I do to fix this issue?

Laptop details:
3 or 4 year old Acer Aspire 5250
AMD E-450 APU with Radeon HD Graphics 1.65 GHz
4 GB Ram
Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit
Added (1). To be clear: I have not added any hardware whatsoever other than mice the entire time I've owned it. Furthermore, I've seen online people running similar setups with a tenth the allotted "hardware reserved" ram.

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