81 processes,0% cpu and 73% physical memory.
Is this normal on a new laptop and if not what to do to fix.
Eighty-one processes seems high, although I don't recall what the baseline is on a fresh install of Windows 7. About 30 processes is typical on Windows XP. Many of the processes may be junk software preinstalled on the machine.
The CPU figure indicates that none of the processes is using any significant CPU power, which is good.
Ps what is physical memory anyway?
Physical memory is the actual electronic memory installed in the machine. It is contrasted with virtual memory, which is a much larger memory space that doesn't entirely exist at one time. Virtual memory is dynamically mapped to physical memory on an as-needed basis.
For example, if a program requires ten gigabytes of memory, and there are only two gigabytes of physical memory on the machine, the required ten gigabytes will be mapped into virtual address space, and will be allocated backing store (a big disk file). As the program touches various parts of the virtual memory space, if those parts are not already mapped to some location in physical memory, the program will be suspended, the required area of virtual memory will be copied from backing store on disk to some location in physical memory, and execution of the program will be resumed. The program thinks it has 10 gigabytes of memory, even though the computer is only really equipped with 2 gigabytes of physical memory.
It's normal for virtually all of physical memory to be in use. The operating system tries to keep physical memory as busy as possible. It will periodically move memory pages out of physical memory and onto backing store, and vice versa, on an as-needed basis as different programs touch their virtual memory spaces. The net effect is that programs can reference far larger memory spaces than are actually available in the physical memory of the machine, transparently and with only a small effect on overall performance.