From the monthly archives:
April 2007
Sharing the memory
Sharing the memory
Mac Tip #286/25-April-2007
The best money you can spend on a computer is to give it more RAM, the working space for your computer. It’s like a kitchen bench: you can easily make a cheese sandwich in a tiny space, but to make a three course dinner for 10 you’d better have plenty of room.
Each process running on your Mac takes up a certain amount of RAM. In theory each one takes just as much RAM as it needs, when it needs it and then gives it back. But just as in real life where the last family member to make a sandwich didn’t put the bread away or wash the knife, some processes aren’t so well behaved.
Click on the System Tab near the bottom of the Activity Monitor window to see how the computer’s memory is being used. [Last week's Tip introduced Activity Monitor.]
The pie chart in the screenshot shows that I have 2 Gigabytes of RAM. The list on the left shows almost 175Mb is being used for ‘Wired’ memory — that’s memory that’s actually in use.
There’s another 999Mb Active — also supposedly in use. If necessary that can be swapped out to virtual memory.
Virtual memory is hard disk space that can be used temporarily as memory. That’s like sitting at the kitchen table to peel the spuds if the bench is too full to do it there.
699Mb is Inactive. Something was using it, but not right this minute. That can be swapped (paged) to virtual memory.
The 1.83Gb figure is the total of the left column. There’s a meagre 171Mb actually free.
Memory is a shared resource on your Mac. The applications you have running should not all need the whole lot at the same time, just as in a city it’s not expected that every driver will be on the same road at the same moment.
But just as Aucklanders suffering gridlock know they need more roads, Activity Monitor can show you if you’re running more applications at one time than your Mac can comfortably handle. The solution may be more RAM, a newer Mac, to Quit applications you’re not currently using, or even to work a bit less.
Next week: How much of the Hard Disk is used?
Popularity: 8% [?]
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Who’s using my RAM?
Who’s using my RAM?
Mac Tip #285/18-April-2007
In last week’s Tip I wrote: …you should be careful with widgets. Each open widget uses some of the available RAM.
Which leads to the questions: how do I tell how much RAM is being used, and what exactly is using it?
The good news is that you can find out without spending a cent by using Activity Monitor — it’s in the Utilities folder (in the Applications folder). Open Activity Monitor and click on the System Memory tab at the bottom.
Look at the Real Memory column to see what’s using up your RAM. Many of the items might not mean anything to you — a lot of them belong to the Operating System.
If you click on the words Real Memory at the top of that column then the table will be sorted with the biggest RAM users at the top. Click again to reverse the sort order.
On my machine as I write the biggest users are LaunchBar, kernel_task, Eudora, MarsEdit, iTunes and WindowServer.
Reminder: KB are smaller than MB, which are smaller than GB.
You may like to read the short article at the MacTips Learning Centre: Power Up to Memory Management.
Next week: more on Activity Monitor and memory.
Popularity: 10% [?]
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What’s the time in Dublin?
What’s the time in Dublin?
Mac Tip #284/11-April-2007
These days it’s highly likely you have friends and family spread across the globe. The Internet makes it cheap and easy to keep in touch by email, live chat, VoIP (making free phone calls over the Internet) and so on.
But there remains one enormous barrier, and that’s the difference between night and day. When it’s noon in New Zealand it’s midnight in Dublin. Or thereabouts.
Making life even more complex is Daylight Savings Time: when it’s summer in New Zealand it’s winter in Dublin. For many of us that means lots of head scratching about whether that notional 12 hour difference is now 13 or even 14, or maybe 11 or 10 hours.
Mac OS X’s Dashboard can help, or more particularly the Clock widget. [You may like to refer to Dashboard, Mac Tip #211/07-September-2005 for help.]
Click the Dashboard icon in the Dock to call up the Dashboard. Now locate the Clock widget and either click it, or drag it out of the strip of widgets. Note: you can call up as many clocks as you need; you’re not restricted to one.
Hover over the bottom right corner of the clock widget and a small letter i will appear. Click that to reach the settings.
Choose a continent and a city, then click Done. The clock widget should now show the time for the place you’re interested in. To check the time in future you need only call up the Dashboard.
Now a note of caution: if your computer isn’t fully loaded with RAM then you should be careful with widgets. Each open widget uses some of the available RAM. If you don’t have much to spare you might prefer to close any widgets you don’t actually need.
To track the weather, use the weather widget. I wrote about that in More on Widgets, Mac Tip #213/21-September-2005. Extra tip for Kiwis: be sure to specify New Zealand when you enter your town in the weather widget settings.
Popularity: 19% [?]
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is jointly authored by Miraz Jordan and Maria Langer.