
  what happens to the excess 1 GB of RAM? Nothing at all? 


Nothing happens to it. It just isn't used. In Task Manager, Windows will show a "Total" of 7168 MB in the system, and that's all it will use. 

The unused RAM will still consume some power, as the refresh circuits have no way of knowing that some of the bits don't matter (anyway, it is not possible for bits in a RAM chip to be selectively refreshed).  

Note that if you have just a single module with eight or sixteen chips, this would not result in one or two of the chips being unused. That isn't how RAM modules are organized. 


  I have a dedicated video card and video RAM, will it affect that at all? 


No. Video RAM is not counted in the RAM used by Windows memory management. 


  Will this effectively guarantee that I never use more than 87.5% of my total RAM in Windows?


Not just "effectively". It WILL guarantee that. 


  Overall, I guess what I'm asking is if this would be any sort of effective strategy to increasing system stability, or would it just make it more complicated? I am using Windows 8.1 (64-bit).


No, sorry. What is the nature of the instability you're seeing? Exactly what is the system doing, or not doing? Let's start with that. "Instability" could mean any of several things: BSODs, persistent application failures or hangs, whole-system hangs, ... what is the system doing? 

If you think you have failing memory, then memtest86+ or the built-in memory test in Windows (Vista and later) should be tried. If you have more than one DIMM or SIMM, the best way to isolate memory errors to one module is to pull them one at a time, if your mobo permits that, and see if the instability persists (but expect the system to slow down, of course). If your motherboard doesn't permit that, or you only have one module, the only way to really know if a problem is due to a failing module is to try replacing it with a known good one. 

What happens to the rest of my RAM if I limit Windows to a lowered amount?
Per Google PageSpeed's recommendation, I inlined much of my CSS. Previously, I had minified all of my CSS through W3 Total Cache, but now I inlined much of my CSS, plus all of the CSS that controls Google Fonts. 

Now Google Fonts aren't appearing on mobile devices, but they do appear on desktops. Any reason why this is the case? The mobile screen cap here shows the fonts not loading.

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Condensed'),local(RobotoCondensed-Regular),url(https://fonts.gstatic.com/s/robotocondensed/v13/Zd2E9abXLFGSr9G3YK2MsNKDSU5nPdoBdru70FiVyb0.woff2) format("woff2");unicode-range:U+0100-024F,U+1E00-1EFF,U+20A0-20AB,U+20AD-20CF,U+2C60-2C7F,U+A720-A7FF}@font-face{font-family:'Roboto Condensed';font-style:normal;font-weight:400;src:local('Roboto Condensed'),local(RobotoCondensed-Regular),url(https://fonts.gstatic.com/s/robotocondensed/v13/Zd2E9abXLFGSr9G3YK2MsH4vxAoi6d67T_UKWi0EoHQ.woff2) format("woff2");unicode-range:U+0000-00FF,U+0131,U+0152-0153,U+02C6,U+02DA,U+02DC,U+2000-206F,U+2074,U+20AC,U+2212,U+2215,U+E0FF,U+EFFD,U+F000}@font-face{font-family:'Roboto Condensed';font-style:normal;font-weight:700;src:local('Roboto Condensed Bold'),local(RobotoCondensed-Bold),url(https://fonts.gstatic.com/s/robotocondensed/v13/b9QBgL0iMZfDSpmcXcE8nBYyuMfI6pbvLqniwcbLofP2Ot9t5h1GRSTIE78Whtoh.woff2) format("woff2");unicode-range:U+0460-052F,U+20B4,U+2DE0-2DFF,U+A640-A69F}@font-face{font-family:'Roboto 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format("woff2");unicode-range:U+0000-00FF,U+0131,U+0152-0153,U+02C6,U+02DA,U+02DC,U+2000-206F,U+2074,U+20AC,U+2212,U+2215,U+E0FF,U+EFFD,U+F000}&lt;/style&gt;


Can be seen here.
