Okay, so sautéing usually means you're cooking food quickly in a small amount of fat over pretty high heat, like for vegetables or thin cuts of meat. The food is supposed to brown really fast on the outside but stay tender inside. It's more about movement, tossing the food around in the pan.
Frying, though, can be a bit different. It means cooking food in fat, but there's a wider range. Shallow frying uses more fat than sautéing, often enough to come up part way around the food, and deep frying is when the food is totally submerged in hot oil. So you definitely wouldn't use the same amount of oil for both.
I was actually trying to fix this wierd squeaky cabinet in my kitchen while cooking dinner last night, and I almost burned my sautéed veggies because I got distracted. DIY projects are always more complicated when you're trying to multitask!
