Free Ram - Why so little?

So i have been experiencing some software problems - photoshop and dreamweaver crashing, things taking ages to load..

for the last day or so ive been watching my istat pro in my dashboard and out of 2gb its telling me i only have 30mb FREE? i only have safari itunes and thunderbird running... what could be using up all my RAM?

Well to start with istat eats ram but not too much. Use activity monitor its much better. You should have 4 sections for RAM. Wired, Active, inactive and free. My system is currenly using 87.29, 105.07, 222.34 and 609.3 respectivly with safari open.

where can i find activity monitor? Does safari use up alot of RAM then?

Safari doesn't on my system. Activity monitor is the utilities folder in the application folder

im looking at my activity monitor at all users. there is something called kernal_task by the user root thats using around 110MB of real memory and 1.22gb of virtual memory

What is this? Im guessing it has something to do with the running of OS... still not quite sute why i have so little free RAM, how many RAM in total have you got in ure mac ???

One Gig, whats the total usage. OSX is very good with RAM.

its now on:

wired: 227
active: 719
inactive: 686
free: 413

running safari itunes and thunderbird