How to free up memory in MacBook Pro?

Revolving rainbow, I haven't heard that one. Commonly, it's called the spinning beachball, but I like your thinking :-)

Anyway, is it really an issue of not enough memory? When the spinning beachball pops up when starting apps, it could indicate a failing harddrive. Have you backed up lately?

You can check free memory by going to Launchpad, opening the Utilities folder and starting Activity Monitor. When you click on the System Memory tab, what do the numbers say for Free, Active and Inactive?

What is the year model of your MBP and related specifications? Is this a RAM issue or HDD issue?

Ciao.

I suspect that your problem is storage. What is the size of your HDD and how much space do you have left? You can COMMAND 'I' on the HDD icon on the upper right hand corner of your desktop for that information. Download from the Internet OmnoDiskSweeper (free) and open it. It will show all of your files and the respective sizes. Delete what you don't need.

In your Applications folder is a Utilities folder where Activity Monitor resides. That is what Bar1977t is referring to. He assumed that you have Lion, not Snow Leopard, hence the bit of confusion.

Ciao.

Check the health of the hard drive with http://www.volitans-software.com/smart_utility.php

You don't have to worry about freeing ram, OS X does a pretty good job handling all that. Hope it helps, let me know what Smart Utility says.

First, go and buy yourself an externat hard drive, then use Time Machine to create a full backup of your disk. Or you can use Disk Utility to create a full, bootable clone of your internal disk.

And second, buy your Mac a new internal HD, the one you have is failing. Once it is installed use Migration Assistant to restore your programs, settings and data from TimeMachine.

Remember, Backup is dead, about to be buried in June. TimeMachine is a fine replacement, start using it today!

Erkki Kangas is correct. Your top priority should be purchasing two HDDs and an enclosure. One to replace your internal HDD and the other for backup

I suggest getting at least 500 Gb and preferably 750 Gb capacity HDDs. This allows for expansion and will improve performance. Also AVOID getting HDDs with built in sudden motion sensors because they can conflict with the internal one in the MBP. (at least for the oneinternal you will be replacing the current one) This way you will avoid installation problems.

Ciao.

PS. OmniDiskSweeper is 6.9 Mb. This now is a low priority.

Hi

I have a question about the system memory of my mac and it seems like you might know the answer.

I have used boot camp to set aside system memory space for windows. But later I decided not to install windows.

I used the way you have advised and got to the activity monitor and here is what I got for the numbers:

free: 1.34GB

active: 1.14GB

Inactive: 353.3MB

It's not clear exactly what you're asking. You would allocate disk space for BootCamp, not RAM (memory). When you launch your system into Windows, all of your installed RAM is available. This would be a little different if you were using a BootCamp installation via a virtual machine (VirtualBox, Parallels, etc), but that doesn't seem to be the case here. The numbers you have posted show your available RAM. Setting up BootCamp would not have any impact on your available RAM under OS X (whether you installed Windows or not).

As you don't seem to have actually asked a specific question, it's hard to know what you're trying to find out.

You should also probably start a new thread for this topic as it is not really related whatsoever to the original post. Anyone browsing through might not catch it.