I built a 4200 dual core machine with 2 Gig Ram and 500Gig HD ... loaded vista and my memory usage when the machine idled was over 45%
Did some downloading and ram jumped to 75% usage and even up to 95% at times ... running just basic stuff
got fed up and loaded XP Pro last weekend and have not been above 10% ram ever since
I just booted from the XP CD as mentioned before ... full format of the drive ... and new XP install
