i dont know if this realy matters but i thought i might bring it up justin case...
A while back i was haveing problems with heat. my computer would heat up in about 45 seconds, overheat in 10 minuts, and spontaniously shut down from heat in about 20 minuts. this was all while i was doing NOTHING. in Gnome there is a nice little pannel applet that moniters cpu usage and stuff. it was always full blast no matter what i did (or did not) do. i found out that this was because of the fact that acpi was off. i turned it on and now everything works great.

I was looking into this pannel applet some more and found that it moniters other stuff as well. so i turned it all on and put it in another pannel on the side of my screen. everything is in working order but the memory is full and never empties. when it gets over-full it starts to overflow into the swap space as it should, but once again it never goes down. is this just because i only have 256MB ram? does this even matter?

A short answer to this is that linux tries to use most/all of your memory. Depending on
what your running does affect it of course, but with the heavier desktops (kde, gnome, etc)
It is GOOD that linux is using your ram - as it is much faster then using the drive.

I usually run about 350 - 480MB used with my 512, so I am guessing with 256, your doing
about right.

-tw

ok thank you much