I use gentoo kernel 2.4...
I have 768MB of memory and am using about 95% of it and the only applications i have open are xchat, openoffice, and gaim. there's about 60 processes running, looks like x server and openoffice are taking the majority of the memory. are there any diagnostics i could do to discover why there's so much memory being used? i recently built a new computer that runs almost identical process but used the 2.6 kernel and it uses only ~270MB of memory with 512MB being the total i have on that one.

as you may notice i'm no expert on how memory works. so any advice or info is appreciated.

If you want to see what is using it then run "top" and press M to sort by memory usage.

Linux tends to use a lot of memory constantly, what's the point of having it if you don't use it!