Getting rid of control characters from mail

http://www.math.iitb.ac.in/~srg/LaTeX/howto.html

use global substitution
:g/cntrl-v cntrl-m/s// /g

Checking memory

try sar(system activity reporting), it is a good alternative to top. My rhel box was having i/o wait which I could find using sar.

sar 1 200
Other commands : free (-m) tells you the total memory, memory used for cache etc.