How much available ram is good

I have a MacBook Pro with 4GB of ram. Its been running really slow lately, for example, last night I had 4 or 5 firefox windows open and it kept freezing up. I looked and I only have 100MB of ram free, tonight its been as low as 55MB. Is this bad? I am going to the Mac store tomorrow to get my battery replaced, should I have them look at it? Any suggestions of what would cause it to run slow or have so little ram free or is that normal?

Thanks

wow thats not good, better find out what program is taking all your ram I also have 4 gigs of ram and the only time I get that low is when I'm going crazy on Autocad.

Here is a picture of the screen with everything on it

I blame Firefox! Guilty!!! no really look at it how many windows/ tabs do you have open?

Ok, what do you mean by windows or tabs open? In firefox, right now I only have 2 tabs open, is that what you mean? Sorry, dont know a ton about Macs besides they are easy to use!

no thats what I meant but only 2 tabs? there's no way 2 tabs would do that. hmm do you have adblock plus or something like that on firefox? I ask because ad block would do that on my Mac when I went to some websites.

Never heard of adblock plus.

it blocks ads on youtube and everywhere else. I'm gonna look around to see whats causing your problem.

I appreciate it! Like I said in the original post, I am going to the Mac store tomorrow, Ill ask them to. Is it possible I need more RAM or could the RAM be bad? My hard drive is almost completely empty, I have 0 widgets, maybe 2 or 3 apps but I never use them.

Wow that is a crazy amount of RAM for fire fox. I have had 12+ tabs open and have never in my time of using the internet seen firefox go above a gig. And im always curious as to what is doing what. Do you have a lot of addons in firefox and/or have a theme and whatnot?

jrandis04 said:

I appreciate it! Like I said in the original post, I am going to the Mac store tomorrow, Ill ask them to. Is it possible I need more RAM or could the RAM be bad? My hard drive is almost completely empty, I have 0 widgets, maybe 2 or 3 apps but I never use them.

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I use firefox all the time and it has never been a ram hog for me, (Safari is a different story)

There's some reason that Firefox is eating up all that ram, what are your normal browsing sessions like? Do they consist of a lot of video streaming, flash games, or any other intensive tasks?

No add ons or themes, everytime it reboots it always asks me to download stuff and I always say no

When I surf the web its just facebook, email, news, sports stuff, very few times do I watch videos or do music

Have you tried deleting and reinstalling firefox? Unless firefox is asking you to download their update there should be no reason it should prompt for any type of download. Perhaps you have some spyware/malware?

How do I uninstall it? Do I just drag it to the recycle bin or is there a program somewhere on the computer like in Windows to uninstall programs?

jrandis04 said:

No add ons or themes, everytime it reboots it always asks me to download stuff and I always say no

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Asks you to download what exactly? Those could be important Firefox updates...you might want to look into that.

jrandis04 said:

When I surf the web its just facebook, email, news, sports stuff, very few times do I watch videos or do music

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There's a lightweight Web browser that I use for my older Macs, it's Called Camino. Still made by Mozilla just like firefox, but runs off very little ram and uses a small amount of the CPU. You might want to give it a download and see how it compares to Firefox in ram consumption.

They are for games, like a toolbar thing, something to do with Mafia Wars

My macbook is not even 2 years old, would I need something like Camino?

Ok, I just checked the updates are for MovieBario Community Toolbar and Zynga Toolbar

BTW, available RAM is up to 2.65GB.... Idk what I did, I closed firefox and reopened it

jrandis04 said:

Ok, I just checked the updates are for MovieBario Community Toolbar and Zynga Toolbar

BTW, available RAM is up to 2.65GB.... Idk what I did, I closed firefox and reopened it

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THAT is probably your problem. Zynga is very irritating with their toolbars, addons, etc. Uninstall them under Tools, and see how the ram consumption is affected.

FYI, any toolbars usually come with a lot of baggage and usually contain some kind of data mining and tracking programs(spyware) that can really stress the resources and make that program hog system RAM and other resources.

If you wish to try and uninstall and reinstall firefox you can can either get a program called app zapper, or locate the firefox folders and see if there is an uninstall process or just delete all the folders relating to it.