Memory leak? Please help.

I'm running firefox, sometimes safari, adium a word processor, sometimes itunes, yahoo widgets (about 4 of them), and one or two dashboard widgets. And Time Machine.

My memory goes from about 1GB being used to 1.5GB being used, even though I've opened no other programs! So I'm wondering what's going on.

I'm even surprised that a whole gigabyte is being used with light web surfing and a few widgets being open.

 

I guess I worry about it because the temperature of my macbook goes up from fifty to sixty+ degrees for no reason, too. And that seemed to happen at the same time as the memory went down.

does it have anything to do with virtual memory? It seems like every process has about 1GB of virtual memory that it's using.

i'm just wondering what's going on since I'm new to macs. I have a 19" monitor plugged in and i put my time machine drive and keyboard and mouse plugged into a powered usb hub, thinking that would help, but it hasn't changed much. Except for the fact that my computer now misses keystrokes from the keyboard.

Maybe I shouldn't worry about it. But rising temperatures, using most of the 2GB memory for basic stuff...just seems kind of weird for a brand new computer.

 

it shows 1.26 gb used. there's very little "inactive" but thanks for explaining that to me, since i'm still new with this.

firefox shows the most use at 140 mb, adium at 40mb, and i have nothing else open except widgets and mozy...neither of which show more than 10-30mb per program. oh, finder shows 45mb...don't know if that's normal.

 

really? ahh, well that explains it! i knew there was something missing from the equation.