Windows question

[PersonaNonGrata]

I'm not sure if I'm doing the right thing so I could use some help.

I am noticing that my PC is running anywhere between 45 and 50% RAM just doing basic stuff like typing this message. I'm running 1GB. I know that there must be stuff running in the background that is eating up RAM but 50% seems to be too much. So I want to know how to best shut down some stuff that is loaded up at startup. I'm assuming that most of it are displayed in the System Tray. For example I'm running an ATI utility, ActiveSync for my iPaq, Norton AV (Corporate Edition), and a few other things. I sometimes run Skype and uses up a fair bit of RAM it seems.

What I have done is get into msconfig and manually disable some programs. I did that and I'm still eating up RAM. Is the the best way to do this or is there a better way?

I am particularly sensitive to this because I got a sweet new keyboard that has a backlit LCD display and one thing is scrolls is CPU and RAM usage.