Why i am running out of Ram quickly when im not doing much?

[Cjshino]

i have 4gb of ram and activity monitor says i only have 737.4 mb of free space left of my ram. the only thing i have on is steam, activity monitor and google chrome.

1,019 mb is Wired
1.50 gb is active
832.9 mb is inactive

[simsaladimbamba]

RAM is there to be used. Unused RAM is wasted RAM.

Look here for information about WIRED, INACTIVE, FREE and USED RAM:

Mac OS X: Reading system memory usage in Activity Monitor

[grapes911]

Inactive is essentially free RAM was well. It was being used but it no longer being used so it's inactive.

[snberk103]

As a general rule of thumb... you want as much stuff in RAM as possible, without overfilling. The more stuff that is in RAM, the 'snappier' the system will feel. Until you open too many applications it starts writing to the HDD. But up until then, you it's better if OS X caches things in RAM.

[Mrbobb]

Originally Posted by snberk103

you want as much stuff in RAM as possible

One would think.

I just spent two days trying to reload a circa 2001 Windows XP onto new hardware and can't figure out why it keeps complaining about corrupted files, googled to find out the uncompress app of that era can't handle a large memory space as I have now (go figure!). Took out 1 memory stick and now the install proceeds normally!

Well I'd be darned.

(OK go ahead with the Windows jokes)

[snberk103]

Originally Posted by Mrbobb

One would think.

I just spent two days trying to reload a circa 2001 Windows XP onto new hardware and can't figure out why it keeps complaining about corrupted files, googled to find out the uncompress app of that era can't handle a large memory space as I have now (go figure!). Took out 1 memory stick and now the install proceeds normally!

Well I'd be darned.

(OK go ahead with the Windows jokes)

Nothing special to Windows... that is just a weirdly funny computer thing. Could have been any OS, eh?