Can someone tell me what Vista does with all my RAM?

[Daboo]

I have a Toshiba laptop with Vista Home Premium and it ran OK but a bit slow with 1 GB of RAM. I upgraded to 2 GB of RAM, been running this for 2 months and now I find occasionally I get warning messages to free up some memory as little is available.

Task Manager shows, after boot up Total = 1917, Cached = 1308, Free = 67 and also shows Physical Memory 39%. When I start programs then Free memory goes down. What does it do with the cached memory? I should not be that low on memory from just starting up Vista. There aren't many things in the system tray I can do without - it has things like virus protection and utilities to run devices on the laptop.

Any suggestions what I can do to ease up Vista hogging and sharing all my RAM?

[Daboo]

After submitting the first post I found this thread.

So now I have a better understanding why Vista does what it does. I guess my problem is really with the program I was using. It is an older version of Corel Draw ( V 12 from the XP days) and seems to monitor free memory and freaks out when it sees memory running low. I guess this is just a nagging false alarm if I understand the situation I'm in.

[Dave21]

Vista is a ram hog. The O/S itself takes up 1gb+ ram. You might want to try to tone down the effects for better performance.