How much memory used?

Hi Redsoxflynn and welcome to the forums!

I don't think you mean 'memory' (RAM) but available hard disk space.

Every time you open Finder from the Dock it shows you at the bottom of the window how much space is left.

Does it not say 'xxxitems, 87.41 GB'?

Start with the size of your hard disk, deduct 87.41 and the difference is how much space your operating system and software take up.

Is this the first computer you have ever worked on?

Is 87.41 alot??

How long is a piece of string?

It obviously depends on what you need it for.

AS Klaus1 says, it does depend on many things.

As an example, say your digital pictures are 3MB in size each, then you could store about 29,000 pictures. Movies, well that depends on the resolution of the output and length so it's impossible to guess.

To check how much space you have left on your drives, you can use Activity Monitor in the Applications -> Utilities folder to show how much is free/used in a nice pie chart.

I'm not a graphic designer, but I would image that you will use up 86GB creating images/movies in a relatively short period of time.

1000 MB = 1 GB.

Why don't you find an adult who knows about the computer you have borrowed?

Hi,

1024MB = 1GB

In iPhoto, select one file and bring up the information pane in the bottom left hand corner of iPhoto - that should show how many MB one image takes up. The status bar at the bottom of the iPhoto window, I think, shows you how many images are in the currently selected album, so times one by the other to get an estimate 🙂

Sorry the directons are a bit vague, I'm not on a Mac at present to double check.

Download WhatSize @ http://www.versiontracker.com/dyn/moreinfo/macosx/21149
It will show you how much harddrive space your files/folders use.

 Cheers, Tom 😉

Many thanks for the help in this thread for those of us who don't have extensive knowledge of the inner workings of a computer.

I'm having a similar problem. I keep being told my memory is almost full. When I run the Activity Monitor as advised above, it says my system memory has 373 Mb free. But my disk usage says that all 38.28 GB of my hard drive are full. I have to admit that I don't know the difference or what to do now. (Buying a new system would be ideal, but I'm kind of lacking the 1500 right now. LOL!)

Can anyone help me in a "Mac for Dummies" kind of way? (unless you're prone to condescension. I can do without, thanks.)

You are not the only one who gets confused between Memory (RAM) and disk capacity.

An article about RAM here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RAM

and about your Hard Disk here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_disk

[i ]my disk usage says that all 38.28 GB of my hard drive are full

That is not a healthy state for your system to be in. At least 10% of your hard disk, or about 5GB, should be free to allow your operating system to work properly, which includes creating temporary swap files and so on.

Having your hard disk full usually results in system crashes and damage to the operating system.