top or htop? Which one lies?

[Bruce Marshall]

On Saturday 07 November 2009, Mark Greenwood wrote:
> I hope someone on here can clear this up.
> 
> According to top my RAM is as follows:
> 2060580k total,  1866728k used,  (which seems to me to be a ridiculously
>  enormous amount of RAM to run a bare desktop) According to htop (which I
>  can't copy and paste)
> 269/2012MB (which seems to me to be a quite miraculously small amount of
>  RAM to run a bare desktop)
> 
> Which one lies? And why the mahoosive discrepancy? And why are there never
>  any simple answers in life? (you may ignore the 3rd question, I asked the
>  GF that one and she gave me "that look").
> 
> Mark
> 


And what does the  'free'  command say?