about activity monitor process....

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Powermac G4 Dual 1.25/768mb/240g
I'm sure this is a newbie Q, but here goes: I would like to know what Wired, Active, Inactive, and Free are when concerning the system memory. When deciding whether or not I need more ram should I look at the free memory; if it's always low when running apps (10mb) should I get more ram or do I go by my active memory? My inactive memory always seems to be higher (currently at 413mb). Is inactive spare memory for apps? I'm just a little confused. Hope this makes sense as I'm not quite up to par with all the tech stuff. TIA
 
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Performa 6116 2GBSCSI 8MB OS 7.5.3
It's my understanding that Active memory is just that. Memory currently in use. Inactive memory is memory that was at one point in use but is available to be used if needed at any time. I stores recent info to be accessed quicker if the scenario presents itself. Free memory is just that ,...free and unused yet.

Regardless you ideally should have at least 512mb. If you think of RAM as the top of you desk and Harddrive(swapfile) as your filing cabinet, you see that it's quicker to access things from your desk(hopefully) then moving to your filing cabinet. Therefore if your desk is larger you need to accesss your filing cabinet less. If you feel your desk is to small buy more RAM.

512 is plenty for day to day 256 is bare minimum
 
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iMac Graphite 500MHz G3, 640 MB Ram
In Activity Monitor, you can go to Help > Activity Monitor Help, and it gives quite a good description of the different states of memory somewhere in there :)
 

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