slim down Vista's fat backside?

[Joe 90]

its really starting to annoy me know.... vista will happily sit on 3 out of my 4GBs of memory when all i have open is firefox and a few things in the sys tray like MSN, a bandwidth monitor, ESET AV etc....

now maybe previously i was doing something that meant loading up a load of files to run photoshop or something, but now i'm not and i'd like some performance back!!

i'm getting issues simply using windows explorer and extracting an ISO, I assume, because of this lack of available memory.

is there any way to release some memory? and i don't want to have to constantly take the default MS fix of a reboot!