macbook help please!!

[furcalchick]

i have two problems with my macbook c2d that seemed to have come up in the past week. although they aren't serious, it is annoying and i would like to fix them soon.

1. apparently, my free ram seems to get sucked up alot faster than it did before, with less programs it's already down to under 50 mb of memory, but the inactive memory is very high up there. is this something i need to keep my eye on? any way to fix this, or is this okay?

2. battery life for my computer is now half that of when i first had it. back in december, i could go 3-4 hours on the battery, now, i can barley go 2 hours, and that's if i'm lucky. i re-calibrated the battery the other day and not too much has improved. anyway to get my battery life back, because i don't want to be tethered to my outlet plug with this thing.

and a thought: should i install 10.4.9 and how should i do this? this is my first os update with macs, and i heard about the crashing horror stories associated with it. is there anything i can do to help prevent the crashing, etc?

thanks!!!

 

[Silver-Fox]

yes you should update, these are important for security etc

and have you checked how many cycles your battery has gone through?

 

[CanadaRAM]

1) Don't worry about how OSX manages RAM

2) If you have a battery problem, call Applecare wile it is under warranty.

 

[tyr2]

Your available free RAM is actually that which is labeled free AND the RAM that is labeled inactive.

Inactive RAM is data that is kept in RAM on the off change it may be used again but if any program wants more ram it can be allocated.

Re Battery life: Perhaps worth calibrating a few more times, make sure you leave it on/off for the specified periods in the manual.

Re update: Worked fine for me.

 

[furcalchick]

40

40 cycles on the battery.

i'll see about calibrating it a few more times, maybe tomorrow before leaving to another spring training game.

but is it wise to close all programs before installing the update, as it seems like we get all types of crashes with these types of things...i'll probably do it friday.