I forgot where that was, since I don’t much play around or look at that. That’s under Task Manager, I believe. I’ll note what it says (although it changes from moment to moment)...
CPU usage: ranges from 1 to 20%
Memory: 1.44GB
Physical memory (MB)
Total 2806
Cached 1352
Available 1340
Free 34
Kernel memory (MB)
Paged 242
Nonpaged 84
Does that show what you’re asking or is it something else ?
When I switched my laptop to Win7 from XP, but before I added more RAM, the memory meter would run around 60%-80%. When it got into the 80s and higher, it would do the same symptoms you've described.
Doubling the RAM to 4GB got the mem usage percentages down below 40% and now it runs fine, with none of the previous problems.
Something might have broken with your machine, but my guess is your problems will go away with more memory and you could get a few more years of use out of it.