New iMac eats all memory after upgrade to 12GB

I bought a new iMac (Apple - iMac - Compare the 21.5- and 27-inch iMac.) (the first one).

I also bought another 8GB of memory. The performance is dramatically better but still as you can see from Activity Monitor some programs just swallow too much memory (Skype, Chrome).

I run in Parallels Desktop 7 Windows 7. I gave to it 3GB of memory and 2 CPU cores.

Is it normal that from 12GB I only have 50 - 150MB free?

EDIT: I have OS X Lion on it.

Neither Skype nor Chrome are what's eating your memory. The VM and Flash alone are using around 6 GB when you add in the kernel task.

Anyway, what you're seeing is normal. Just let the system handle the memory and don't worry over it. You can probably close some of the apps you're currently running and save a bit.

Tnx for the answer. I got worried ;D