Macbook air suddenly slow.

[orfeas0]

I have a 2011 mba 11" with 2gb ram and it was running fine but it seems kinda sluggish now... I mean even an e-book on preview and 2-3 firefox tabs seems a lot for it to work fast.
Might it be that it's connected to a 1080p external display? But it wasn't like that from the start.

It's very slow when I'm doing things on the external display, either browsing or reading.
Also, I never have more than 100mb free ram, even though I have like 700mb inactive.
I read that inactive is as good as free, but is that really true? Otherwise why would it be slow if I have so much free ram?
Is it the GPU's problem?

 

[filmbuff]

It's not GPU related if it is just taking a long time to load things. It probably is the RAM since you only have 2GB. I don't know how much you are using at any moment but I bet that is the culprit. If it really slowed down dramatically all at once you could have a bad stick of RAM.

 

[paulcdb]

best bet is to open activity monitor and see what it shows. Chrome used to be a bit annoying in not releasing memory when it's finished and doesn't 'close' when you tell it to but it's been a lot better now.

 

[orfeas0]

best bet is to open activity monitor and see what it shows. Chrome used to be a bit annoying in not releasing memory when it's finished and doesn't 'close' when you tell it to but it's been a lot better now.

I'm not using chrome any more since I realised it can't run java.

But the thing is, I do have empty ram when it's sluggish.
Activity monitor shows plenty of INACTIVE ram, but only some MBs of FREE ram.
Is Inactive as good as free, or is that a lie? And how do I empty it? Should I reset the vram?

 

[paulcdb]

I'm not using chrome any more since I realised it can't run java.

But the thing is, I do have empty ram when it's sluggish.
Activity monitor shows plenty of INACTIVE ram, but only some MBs of FREE ram.
Is Inactive as good as free, or is that a lie? And how do I empty it? Should I reset the vram?

inactive just means it's assigned to something but not being used atm.

If you look in activity monitor and sort real mem column it might show up otherwise you could try downloading MemoryFree 2 from the appstore as that has an option to free some unused ram.

I haven't been using mac's that long though so not really much help.