ram problem

What screen shot?

Close some of your programs, not just there windows. Then open Terminal and type purge and then hit the enter/Return key. That will free up RAM.

kali90 wrote:

I need someone to explain this to me...

RAM usage of all open programs together amounts to approx 1.5 GB..

so there should be over 2.0 GB left...

why is there only 203 MB left?

First you are never going to get the numbers displayed in the AE to "add up". Many processes are transitory. Second, you are not even looking at all the processes running in your machine. You are only looking at your processes. To get more information you need to select "All Processes" in the Show popup menu.

It also wouldn't hurt if you read the following article to determine if you need more ram.

Using Activity Monitor to read System Memory and determine how much RAM is being used

I'm getting so sick of this.. my computer is incredibly slow.. it's amazing how no matter what you do computers always become slow eventually, no matter what you do.. (mine is about 1 1/2 yrs old) I thought with a mac this might be different, but no dice...;-)

4 GB really should be enough, certainly for the programs I have open that show in the screenshot...

(I have plenty of free room in HD, by the way, so that's not the problem)

would appreciate some advice as to what I can do here..

When was the last time you verified/repaired your drives with Disk Utility? Boot from installer dvd or recovery partition and run Disk Utility from there.

Try a smc reset.

Also check Activity Monitor in your Utilities folder to see what might be eating up all your RAM... here's what my little pie chart looks like:

You can just dump a screen shot to your desktop using Grab (in your Utilities folder as well), or Shift-Command-3 for a whole screen shot or Shift-Command-4 for a crosshair which you can drag across the area you'd like to capture. Then you can load your image here using the little camera icon at the top of the composition window.

Yes, depending on what you're running, 4 GBs is likely plenty of RAM but you may want to see if your model can be upgraded to 8 GB if it's RAM that's really slowing you down.

Regards,

Clinton

Darn! Saw the screenshot that time. You know what, I'd buy more RAM...

I'm curious how AE shows you have 3.88GB.

Maybe you should Apple Hardware Test to check the ram or Rember to do some additional ram checks.

...all the programs I have open, as shown in screenshot, no way should be using all 4 GB of RAM...

I agree with that!

Do a verify permissions first, then repair them as needed. As a last resort, verify disk and if problems are found, then boot from a DVD or flash drive and repair the disk.

Clinton

Hard drives yes. Ram no. Both Activity Monitor and your System Profiler should be showing the total ram you have installed. If you have four 1GB sticks you should be seeing 4GB in these displays (look at clintonfrombirmingham above).

I still want to know, if all my open apps are using about 1.5 GB, why does the activity monitor show only 302 MB available RAM??????????

See my first post above.

I'll say it again. Your numbers are never going to add up because (a) there are transiant processes and the computation is more difficult than just adding up the AE display and (b) you seem to keep missing the point that you are not showing all the processes the AE can display you posted. I said change the Show popup menu to show all processes, not just yours.

The funny thing to me is that the OP links to an image showing 3.88GB of RAM. When I had 8, it showed up as 8; now that I have 16, it shows as 16. As one poster suggested, I'd run a util to check the RAM like Rember.

And I'm not even going to get into the discussion about how many processes that I have running that are both out of my control (I seldom kill a root process - I just restart) and memory hogs.

Clinton

The funny thing to me is that the OP links to an image showing 3.88GB of RAM. When I had 8, it showed up as 8; now that I have 16, it shows as 16.

I commented on that above that something is "fishy" there. Ram isn't sold in increments of .88GB 😉

As one poster suggested, I'd run a util to check the RAM like Rember.

That was me too. Same post as a matter of fact.