Problem; each time I open a program then close the program it is remaining in memory. (using the system monitor) I am being forced to reboot about every 45 minutes as the cache continues to build up.

In windows I used a program called "CustomizerXP" which allowed me to right click an icon and free-up memory by dumping the cache.

Is there a similar program for Fedora 10 or how do I dump cache without rebooting so often?

Why ? Do you have a real problem, or just an imagined problem ?.
This comes up continually from (ex-)Windoze users that don't understand Linux memory management. Read this - ignore the bit on swappiness for now.

Well Mr. syg00,

the reason for having to reboot is because my computer locks up. It's not that I can quit and restart. I have to power off manually. This is a laptop but should be quite capable of running f10. 1.8 GHz CPU, 1Gb memory, 80Gb HDD. just the basics but should tell you enough to help me figure out why I lock up about every 45 minutes or so while I am not doing any hard-core graphics or cad renderings. I am just surfing the web and usually have anywhere from 6-15 tabs open at one time plus pidgin running and chatting with anywhere from 1-4 people at once. Why is this happening?

hi rongaines,

I do not know if this is the answer but you can kill a process that is running on your pc. Yoy can use kill when using 'top' or 'htop' and that should kill the process. Read the man page of kill to see how yoyu can kill with a SIGTERM.

What I really dont understand is why is the process alive and running when you have obviously killed it.

thank you silverback that helped

Well, that certainly sounds like a real problem. Doesn't make a lot of sense though - as you said, that should run Fedora 10 easily.Nope - we need some hard evidence; error messages or somesuch. What makes you think cache is the problem ?
Closing the programs should remove them from the monitor - at least it does on this F10 system. Does killing them fix it ???.

Next time you have to reboot, run this and post the output hopefully it'll have something useful

This sounds like a flaky memory stick to me. I would try running memtest86 on it overnight. An iffy memory stick can cause all kinds of issues, trouble burning DVDS, random screw ups, etc. Besides it is an easy and cheap thing to check.