When you are running out of memory the operating swaps some of the memory its using out onto the hard disk so it doesnt run out of space, this is called "virtual memory"

Fuck knows why its doing it when you dont seem to have many programs running though.


Do ctrl-alt-delete and get task manager up, and you can order processes by the amount of memory they are using, so you can see if there is something running you dont know about which is eating up your resources.