If you right click on the task bar and start up the Task Manager, that will give you a basic view of the resource usage. The Performance tab will tell you how much physical memory is being used, and the Processes tab will let you see which processes are using how much memory.
2GB isn't a whole lot, and Firefox can easily eat up 1/4 to half of that with a lot of tabs open and lots of flash sites. Depending on what's already in it, upgrading to 3 or 4GB (depending on if you have the 32 or 64 bit version of Windows) might be worth trying for the low cost.
How about your hard drive, is it full? Usually Windows will use part of the drive as virtual memory as well, long before you get an out of memory error.
The shutdown thing is probably driver related, they say Vista drivers work in Windows 7 but I'm skeptical of how well they would.
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