720MB RAM usage at startup: How to trim?

[SavageMac]

I recently purchased a SR MB with 1GB of stock RAM and realized that it wasn't enough; so I installed 4GB that came from Newegg.

Under Activity Monitor I notice that right after bootup I am using roughly 700-720MB of RAM. Is OSX resource hungry like this?

In Windows, I can use 'msconfig' to drastically reduce the startup processes & add speed to the boot process.

What is the Mac OSX equiv? Is there a list of sorts where I can read & learn about processes I don't need, so I can bring that 700 down a bit?

Thank you for reading.



Edit: I am using 10.5.1 if this at all helps.

 

[Blogger]

From what I've read, OSX has a particularly efficient memory management system, it will take what it needs and give up what it doesn't. You really don't need to do anything to free up memory, especially if you have more than 2GB. The memory caching actually speeds up the OS rather than slowing it down.

You can kill running processes from Activity Monitor, but if they are not hung, there's no reason to. If you want to go further that that, a trip to the Terminal is the only route I know, but it's not for the uninitiated.

 

[SavageMac]

I'm not afraid of terminal as I have used it for years with various distros of linux.

I guess I'm just being paranoid and want as much free RAM space as possible, just not used to seeing 700MB at startup on any OS, including my tweaked Vista machine.