RAM Retrieval problem...

Tweet

This has been bothering me for quite some time, and noone else has been able to give me a good answer: How do you retrieve RAM lost to memory leaks? I have one gig of RAM my computer, but I can only use 550MB of it... I just recently got into programming, and I am sure that memory leaks are the cause of this RAM loss. Is there a program I can use, is my RAM now useless, or did I miss something?