Originally posted by alex_ant
She said she got her iMac in May. Like most non-techies, she probably didn't get a RAM upgrade and left the machine in its default configuration of (I presume) 256MB. In that case, the sluggishness she was experiencing is no surprise at all. When a simple MP3 player takes up 30 megs of RAM, plus the Finder and a web browser that together take up a minimum of 50MB, on top of Word which takes up a minimum of 25MB with no documents open, I find it surprising that she didn't find things even more sluggish. Yeah, she should have got a RAM upgrade, but maybe OS X and its applications shouldn't be so damned bloated to begin with.