Ram usuage on mba

jlyanks85 said:

I just got my 11" air for christmas and setting everything up, installed word etc.

Then I went to check the activity monitor and it's saying 1.90 gig of ram is being used out of the 4 that's in here. How is that possible when the only application I have open now is the web browser chrome. The only thing I installed today was ms office using the dvd sharing on my imac.

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Browsers, including Chrome, can use large amounts of memory, depending on how many tabs you have open and what kind of content is on the websites you visit. Flash content is particularly demanding on system resources.

You really don't need to monitor your memory usage, as Mac OS X manages it quite well, without any user involvement. Also, there's more to the story than just free memory.

Mac OS X: Reading system memory usage in Activity Monitor

jlyanks85 said:

I just got my 11" air for christmas and setting everything up, installed word etc.

Then I went to check the activity monitor and it's saying 1.90 gig of ram is being used out of the 4 that's in here. How is that possible when the only application I have open now is the web browser chrome. The only thing I installed today was ms office using the dvd sharing on my imac.

Click to expand...

I have the 2gig 11inch MBA and I just use it for basic computing, or if I want to do something demanding greater power I use it as a thin client with the built in OS X networking capabilities and screen share to access my iMac. Even with 5 or so virtual desktops, each of which has a program such as pages or iTunes on it, and a thin client iMac desktop my MBA still only ever uses 1.8g or so. In the interests of science I got rid off all but one desktop, and disconnected my iMac and yet it still used 1.8g.