Vista low memory issue

[tomster2300]

While playing Spore today my brothers keeps getting warnings that the system is low on memory and needs to close programs (it offers to close Spore for him). Vista has never told this to me before, and I have only changed the following since it last worked without a problem:

I went through a fiasco trying to install my copy of Nero 6. I found out that it isn't compatible with Vista, and it would not completely uninstall without booting into Safe Mode. I still get an error when I try to open video files on my computer since installing it.

A friend of mine installed a free copy of chickenary (a simple word game), and I have yet to run any spyware to see if it brought anything with it.

I have partitioned my hd and installed Ubuntu on it. The Vista space still has 60 free gigs left though, so I don't know what the deal is.

I checked task manager and nothing is running out of the ordinary (except that 86% of the ram is being used with nothing running...). I actually installed Vista SP2 while this was going on, so it was having the problem before and after I added it. I'll post a log of what's running in a bit, but does anyone know of any big issues with Vista off the top of their heads? The machine is the C2D one in my sig.

Thanks!

[shadowpr]

What does task manager show is using all the memory?

[tomster2300]

Right now with only the vista sidebar (gmail notifier and google calendar gadgets), firefox and the task manager running, my physical memory is at 62%.

The free version of Ad-Aware seems to have something running in the background (aawservice.exe), which is odd since the free version doesn't offer real-time monitoring. I'm doing a scan now to see if it finds anything. With it running the physical memory jumps to 78%.

How do I check my virtual memory? What I'm looking at doesn't seem to be adding up to the high percentage. Does Vista cache its memory?

[tomster2300]

I figured it out! I had forgotten that I had gone through and turned page filing off (virtual memory) based on an article I had read awhile back. I enabled it and let Vista set a default size, and now everything works like a charm. Things load much faster now too.

Dumb me; that's what I get for following those random Vista tweaks online...