Reinstalling Mountain Lion took up 4 GB of RAM?

[khunter122]

I reinstalled ML last night hoping it would fix a weird bug (laptop wouldn't wake up from sleep). Mountain Lion takes up about 2 GB normally so I don't understand why it took up 4.... did it add on to the ML that was already downloaded?

I recently just bought 8 GB of RAM and just the other day before I wanted to reinstall this, I saw that I still had all 8 GB.

 

[benwiggy]

Are you talking about RAM, or hard disk space?

If you're talking about RAM, there's no way that the "old" OS is still there. That's not how computers work.

Use Activity Monitor (in your Utilities folder) to see what processes are using lots of memory. You can sort the columns by Real Mem.

However, my general advice is this: if you do not have an actual problem, such as sluggishness, lengthy spinning wheels, etc, --- then go home and sleep easy.

Mountain Lion will make use of the RAM available. If you have more RAM, it will use more RAM. Using RAM is not a Bad Thing™.

 

[khunter122]

Yeah I'm referring to the RAM. That's what I was worried about, I didn't want it to still be there somehow. According to the Activity Monitor, it looks like Firefox is the one taking up the most mb (461.3), followed by the App store...

That makes sense though, thank you -- this is the most helpful response I've gotten so far after asking around online.