Wave wrote:

>I pay a lot of attention to the activity monitor but it really 
>doesnt make enough sense.

I prefer the top command in the Terminal with the -o and -s flags to 
check on memory usage. The -o parameter allows you to sort top's 
output and -s allows you to set the refresh rate in seconds. To sort 
with cpu usage at a 3-second refresh rate, the top command is:

top -o cpu -s 3

An interesting discussion of memory usage as displayed by the 
Activity Monitor can be found here:

http://sg80bab.blogspot.com/2007/03/is-my-mac-using-too-much-memory.html

Ken