Mac OS X RAM HOG?

[antdgar]

I bought my macbook a few days ago.
With nothing on the 'startup' OS X takes up 800MB RAM, out of 1GB.

Is this normal? This is with just the normal system processes. 45 processes.

If the touchpad had full functionality I'd be in Winxp

With MSN, firefox and itunes open it takes up 900MB RAM. O_O Or is only "Active" important?

 

[killmoms]

Are you only looking at "Free" RAM? Because "Inactive" RAM is also free, in the Windows sense of RAM management.

 

[antdgar]

Thanks. active is much lower than the total.

 

[Cromulent]

Thanks. active is much lower than the total.

Active + Wired will tell you exactly how much RAM the system is using. The rest is free.

 

[Jasonbot]

But AFAIK its slower to access inactive RAM as it still happens to have content on it and will be replaced as opposed to just having content put on directly? Or am I wrong?

 

[Freyqq]

this is what inactive ram does

say you open Firefox. It takes maybe 5 seconds the first time to load, and a second every other time. Firefox was loaded into the active memory on the first load. When it was closed, it was put into inactive. Inactive is basically free ram. If you open itunes and you have no free ram available, it might overwright the firefox inactive ram. But, say you open firefox again. Since its in inactive ram, it is already loaded into the ram so it can easily be switched into active ram..so it starts firefox faster.

 

[TheStu]

I bought my macbook a few days ago.
With nothing on the 'startup' OS X takes up 800MB RAM, out of 1GB.

Is this normal? This is with just the normal system processes. 45 processes.

If the touchpad had full functionality I'd be in Winxp

With MSN, firefox and itunes open it takes up 900MB RAM. O_O Or is only "Active" important?

What do you mean if the touchpad had full functionality?

 

[theman]

Does the touchpad not have full functionality under VMware or boot camp?

 

[scaredpoet]

I bought my macbook a few days ago.
With nothing on the 'startup' OS X takes up 800MB RAM, out of 1GB.

Is this normal? This is with just the normal system processes. 45 processes.

If the touchpad had full functionality I'd be in Winxp

With MSN, firefox and itunes open it takes up 900MB RAM. O_O Or is only "Active" important?

Active and Wired are the important parts. What is your Active + Wired?

900MB IS a lot of RAM taken up unless you're running heavy hitters like Photoshop, or bloatware like MS Office (which sadly, I must do on occasion for work stuff). On my MBP with 2GB of RAM, I'm running Firefox, Disk Utility and have a few active dashboard programs up right now. Active + Wired for me is 384.84MB. 62 processes, 211 threads, and I haven't really made an effort to streamline things.

On my Mac Mini with 2GB of RAM: 53 processes, 182 threads. 603 MB in Active + Wired, running Safari and dashboard widgets. And it's been running without a restart for 7 days, 23:54 (it's a week and a half old), with me opening and closing various apps.

What widgets are you running? They take up memory too, and one of them might be hogging things up.

 

[illicium]

Full Finctionality

I think the comment about full touchpad functionality was talking about the fact that you can only right click by holding down the fn key and clicking, instead of being able to just right click like with an HP or Dell laptop.

 

[displaced]

I think the comment about full touchpad functionality was talking about the fact that you can only right click by holding down the fn key and clicking, instead of being able to just right click like with an HP or Dell laptop.

Well, in OS X you can set a two-finger tap to be a 'right' click (well, 'secondary' click - same difference!). A two-finger tap's even better than a PC laptop's right button, IMHO.

When dual-booting into XP using BootCamp, the trackpad driver is limited. Two-finger scrolling still works, but 'tap to click' and 'two-finger right click' do not work. To right-click in XP, you need to click the button whilst having 2 fingers on the trackpad. A bit awkward at times But BootCamp's still in beta, so I'm sure the final release in Leopard will give XP's trackpad support parity with that in OS X.