Hi guys! A couple of questions about my mid-2012 MacBook Pro 13". I'm running with 4GB of Ram. 500GB HDD (142GB used). 2.5GHz processor. It's a month old.
1. My right hand fan doesn't show up on iStat. Is it broken, or does the 13" only have a left fan?
2. I get lagging, at random times for no reason. That's whilst having over 1GB of RAM free. And reasons that could be causing this? Nothing major running in activity monitor.
3. Safari is very hungry on the RAM. Normal?
4. Finder just crashes out for no reason.
5. Applications can sometimes take an ageon to launch from cold. Other times the same application is nearly instant.
1. The 13" has, and always has had only one fan. I believe the 13" retina model may have two, but I have not looked at a teardown of it to make sure.
2. Most likely from the hard drive copying stuff onto RAM. Occasional lag is nothing to be concerned about. If it becomes frequent then you have cause to worry.
3. Yes. Most browsers are RAM sinks.
4. It may be due to a software conflict, I would try and notice what applications are running and what they are doing when this occurs. It's not impossible for it to happen once in a great while for no apparent reason, but frequent occurrence does point to a possible problem.
5. Applications are read from the hard drive then placed into RAM for processing. A spinning platter hard drive is much, much, much slower than RAM is(on the rough order of 100 times slower). If the application is booted "cold", all the data necessary for running it is read from the hard drive and loaded into RAM. Where OS X really shines though, is when you quit applications.
OS X keeps them in RAM until the RAM is needed for something else, that is marked as "Inactive" RAM by activity monitor. So long as that RAM is not needed for some other application, it still contains what was on it. Which explains why if you open, say, Microsoft Word for the very first time, it takes about 15-20 seconds to fully open, whereas if you quit it, and open it again, it merely takes a second or two.
EDIT: The very same thing is why SSD's are all the rage right now. They are roughly 5 to 6 times faster than a traditional hard drive, so application startup and general operation is quicker. A SSD will most likely be a future upgrade for the computer I'm using right now, when the $/GB goes down some more, as of right now, decent capacity is still too expensive for my tastes.
