More Mac questions for the rook (Activity Monitor)

Hey guys, Not sure if you guys are familiar wth Parallels, or maybe this should go in the APP category.

But i was wondering what INACTIVE memory means when you do an activity monitor from the utils menu. I'm trying to see how much memory parallels uses up, so when I booted the activity monitor to check..

i had 12MB of ram left!!! Parallels and OS/X were taking up everything...thats why I could barely movet the mouse.

I literally had 10 meg of memory left to use, but I noticed it said something like 150 to 300 mb of Inactive, and wondered what that meant..

Is that memory there for me to use? is it reserve? or maybe its already in use.

Thanks in advance.

Yeah, this is something I really wondered about when I first got my mac.

Here is what I know- when you close an application in OS X it will keep some or all of the memory in the "inactive" RAM for a quick recall later on. It will then ration out space to the "free" RAM part.

To see the effects of this, run a program that takes a little longer to load after you reboot. Now, close this program completely, (Command-Q) and start it up again. The apps that I have seen the biggest difference with are Aperture and Word. The second start is so much quicker because of the inactive RAM jumping back on stage.

anyone else have any input on this?

There has been a thread like this before and i posted the answer heres the link

http://www.mac-forums.com/forums/showthread.php?t=46381&highlight=activity

hope it answers your question ohh btw there is another link that i posted on there that you can check out for more info