My son asked me how much memory my laptop has to compare it to his Xbox (which has a 250Gb "harddrive"). When I went to "about this Mac," it only showed 8Gb (of RAM). I know my iTunes library alone is over 17Gb. It says it right there on the screen of the same laptop! How is this? How do I find the real limit?
MacBook Pro, OS X Mountain Lion (10.8.3), The wifi I am using isn't locked
RAM and storage memory are two different resources in a computer. You need to look at your storage space because that is what your son is referring to. Storage space is the size of your hard drive.
The computer has Ram, also called memory which is what programs use to operate...that is the 8 GB. They also have storage, the hard drive, where all the programs, music, etc., are kept for use by the software. Hard drive storage is now usually in hundreds of GB. If you see the Macintosh Hard drive image on your desktop, right click or Option click on that, Get Info and it will tell you the size of the hard drive and the Available space.
Thank you very much, Ralph. I know it sounds like a dumb question to some, probably. I figured as much as one was storage and the other operations, just didn't think to put it that way and to be honest, I wasn't really sure because I didn't really know. lol I found it and yes, there's a lot more than 8Gb of storage on my laptop. now I can also explain this to my son. Thanks again.
--Matt
Matt, this kind of question comes up very regularly...a lot of people confuse memory and storage.
If you have the hard drive icon on the desktop, right or option click on it and then click Get Info and see what the available space is.
Then you can tell your son that you have:
8 GB of memory
xxx GB of free storage space
That should be plenty of information to then decide if there is space for whatever he wants to install/do.
Ralph
One more thing, if you do not have the hard drive icon on the desktop you can get it there by:
click on the desktop so the menu bar says Finder next to the apple logo, click Finder, then Preferences, General, Show These Items on desktop and check the hard disks:
That makes life a lot easier when you want to find out information.
Ralph
Thanks again. I figured it was a pretty common question also. I just hate to be the guy who's got all this expensive equipment and doesn't know about it. You have been very helpful, Mr. Landry.
--Matt
You are very welcome, Matt...we are fellow users on here and not Apple employees and do this because we like helping each other with problems.
What's the difference between RAM and other "memory" stored on my laptop?
