I am not sure what all services you guys are running on the server, but server reboot taking 10 mins is bad. You all might be having some unneccesary services running.
SQl Taking away memory is not bad. As Bert was saying SQL will take as much memory as is available, but it will also give it back when the OS wants.
Let me explain it this way. If you have 4GB RAM on your server and sql is running. Lets assume the server needs 1GB ram to run itself and other programs. SQL will take anything that is free. So if you see in task manager you will see that sql is eating 3Gb ram. Next momemnt you fire office application, it needs 300 MB ram, it asks the OS, the OS looks for memory, then sql will give back that 300MB. Bottomline sql will take away anything that is not bein used. I know sql 2005 and plus has come long way in managing this memory sharing sharing stuff. In sql 2000 it would not play nice and cause hangups
Coming back to Server rebooting. Servers are supposed to be up for days and months. Make sure you all are not running too much stuff on one machine.
I reboot the server once in 2 weeks. I rtun win serevr 2008 and no domain etc.
