Another 1GB Of RAM???

[Drpepper99uk]

Hello,

I'm a recent Mac switcher and I'm quite alarmed how much RAM certain application's I use on a regular basis take up. On loading up the usual array of program I use(Skype, Itunes etc) and then checking out the activity monitor it came back with the following information:

Wired: 114.36

Active: 269.09

Inactive: 440.40

Used: 823.84

Free: 200.16

So by looking at the pie chart it seems that there's a large chunk of memory resources being consumed by these programs, and I'm wondering if it would be a good idea to think about upgrading to maybe another 1 GB of RAM? I currently have the 2x 512MB sticks already installed. I also tend to use iMovie quite a lot as well, and perform a fair degree of editing of my video's in there so would this be a worthwhile upgrade?


Michael.

 

[speakerwizard]

dont worry, the mac os will assign all the ram it can to open apps, it has much smarter memory allocation than windows, though like any system, more ram always makes the biggest change

 

[tyr2]

Your available free RAM is the 'free' + 'inactive' so in your example there's about 660gig free.

'inactive' RAM is just caches, OS X will throw it away if the RAM is needed by an application.

As the first reply said, don't worry about it.

 

[wordmunger]

I recently upgraded to 2GB from 1GB in my iMac and it did make a difference, but mostely when I was switching between apps. Especially when I was using Rosetta (Photoshop elements and MS Office). I think iMovie doesn't use Rosetta, so you probably won't see as much of an improvement.

But if you're running a lot (more than 5) of apps at once, then more memory probably will help.