Hey there! My service tag is .  After tinkering around for a while, I decided to do a fresh OS install and put the laptop back to factory settings yesterday. All the software has been reinstalled by now and the RAM issue seems to have been gone. It's now hovering around 6 GB after booting. Still got no idea what caused this. The only modification I made to the system was cloning the 1TB OS drive to a 2TB one to have a bit more space, but I couldn't imagine this would cause any issues with the RAM usage. I'll make sure to keep a close eye on it though in case it happens again!
Well, looks like I'm back here with another issue I have yet to solve, this time concerning the memory usage of my x17 R1. I noticed that on startup, the laptop is using a whooping 18GB of RAM. I've already disabled pretty much everything from startup and uninstalled some non-essential Alienware services, but the laptop is still taking 17 - 18GB after booting. The machine is fully kitted out, using the i9-11980HK/RTX 3080/64GB configuration. The only software I installed has been Maya, Unreal Engine, and the Adobe Suite, with all the services these come with being banished from autostart. Note that I have an older Alienware laptop (15 R3) which also has 64GB of RAM and the same software configuration, but merely uses 6GB on startup. They both run the latest version of Windows 10 Pro as well. My assumption is that the new x17 R1 comes with some kind of new services running in the background, but I can't imagine that any of that would make a difference of over 10GB of RAM on startup.
x17 R1, almost 18GB of RAM usage on startup