OSX FREE MEMORY HOW TO
OSX FREE MEMORY MAC OS
OSX FREE MEMORY FULL
OSX FREE MEMORY MAC

Your Hard Disk is more like a filing cabinet, it takes a bit longer to retrieve information. The information is easy and fast to access. RAM in your computer is like the paper sitting on your desk. OWC – MacsalesĪnother reliable source of good Mac RAM is Other World Computing, also called. It will then show you the options you can buy. iMac or Macbook etc)įinally select the exact model (e.g.

OSX FREE MEMORY MAC

Secondly select your mac when it says ‘select product line’ (e.g. The memory chooser tool looks like this:įirst choose ‘Apple’ where it says ‘Choose Manufacturer’ They have a memory lookup tool for all computers where you choose your model and it shows you exactly what memory you need. OWC might be the better option if you live in the USA. I’m in Australia and it usually arrives in about a week. My Mac mini has 16GB of Crucial RAM in it at the moment. Currently my 2 favourite places to buy RAM are or OWC Computing. It’s worth getting good quality RAM to avoid problems. This is a count of how much Disk Space your computer is using as RAM and it’s a good rough estimate of the minimum amount of extra RAM you need. Eg If your Swap used is 4G then get AT LEAST 4G more RAM. In OSX Lion there is a new entry called ‘Swap Used’. The numbers are smaller but the same principles apply. In OSX Leopard rather than giving a ‘count’ of page in and page outs, it gives a size in GB of the amount of RAM that has been paged in or out. I would add at least another 4G Ram, maybe 8G more to bring it up to 12G. (1GB!) Performance will be suffering badly. This Mac definitely needs some more RAM! Practically no free memory AND High Page-out Count. Tip: Page outs occur when your Mac has to write information from RAM to the hard drive (because RAM is full).

OSX FREE MEMORY FULL

(This is the equivalent of your brain being too full so you have to write your thoughts down on paper to free up some head space) This DRAMATICALLY slows down your computer. If you have no free memory you should get more RAM.Ī Page out means your computer has run out of memory and had to use some of the Hard Disk instead of RAM. There are two important items to take note of ‘Free:’ and ‘Page outs:’įree tells you how much free memory you currently have available to use – the higher the better.

OSX FREE MEMORY MAC OS

On older versions of Mac OS the display looks more like this: Checking your memory on older versions of Mac OS If the memory pressure is yellow it may be worth monitoring over a few days to see if it goes into the red.

If the memory pressure is green you have enough memory (like the screenshot above). Red means your performance is taking a hit because your computer needs to use the disk drive for memory. If there is any red in the memory pressure you need more RAM. Click on the ‘System Memory’ tab at the bottom of the window. This will display a little graph with the memory pressure.Press Apple-1 to make sure that the main window of Utility Monitor is open.Open ‘Activity Monitor’ – it will probably be the top-most application in the Utilities Folder.Go to your Applications/Utilities folder. (Click on your desktop so that the finder is active then hold down Apple-Shift-U, this will open your ‘utilities folder.).Better still, check it at various times over a few days. Don’t do this as soon as you start your computer as this won’t give a good indication of your normal usage. Do this during the middle of using your computer for what you normally use it for.

With El Capitan Apple have introduced a very simple graph based on colours to let you know if you have enough RAM or not.

OSX FREE MEMORY HOW TO

Here’s how to check if you have enough RAM. It’s not just a matter of saying ‘8 GB’ is enough because the amount of RAM you need will vary according to your Mac model and the programs you use. If you run out of free memory then your computer will be forced to use some of your hard disk as memory, which is VERY SLOW because hard drives are much slower to access than your computer’s RAM. When your computer is running a bit slowly, how can you tell if getting more memory will help?

Osx free memory