MacBook pro really slow...what is eating my memory up?

[ToddJ]

I have been having problems with my MacBook Pro going really slow and having sometimes only 15 mb of ram available (I have 2gb total) I didn't have much free hard drive space,so I deleted a lot of stuff but that didn't help. Someone suggested that my hard drive might be dying so I bought a new one (7200 rpm). That didn't help. My last resort is going to be upgrade to 4g (money is tight at the moment so I will have to wait a little while for that.) However, I think 2 gb should be enough for most stuff. What would you suggest might be the culprit?

 

[jenzjen]

When you look in Activity Monitor, what is using the bulk of your memory? 2GB should be fine for an average user, so there's something wrong.

 

[ToddJ]

When you look in Activity Monitor, what is using the bulk of your memory? 2GB should be fine for an average user, so there's something wrong.

Right now the top ones are:

Safari - 240.5 mb
kernal_task - 198 mb
iTunes - 143 mb
Dashboard client - 108 mb
Mail - 98.7 mb
Finder 81.5 mb
Dock 72.3 mb

 

[Moomba]

Difficult to say without more info on the hardware and what software you use regularly. That said IMHO I personally, consider 4gb a minimum. With only 2gb if you run even one memory hungry app it will start to slow down. That said, there are a number of people that feel 2gb is adequate. I'm simply not one of them. I'm actually about to upgrade my 4gb to 8gb. Then. Again I also deal with Some rather memory hungry Adboe products daily and use a VM or two.

That said, you could try using Disk Utility to try and Repair Permissions. You could also check to make sure you don't have any corrupt Prefrences. There are a number of tools available to do just this.

However, with only 2gb I would suspect not enough RAM. Also, every so often close your web browser as they tend to obble up more memory the longer they've been open. Oh, and make sure you are quitting applications (command+q) and not simply minimizing them.

 

[dal20402]

I have been having problems with my MacBook Pro going really slow and having sometimes only 15 mb of ram available (I have 2gb total) I didn't have much free hard drive space,so I deleted a lot of stuff but that didn't help. Someone suggested that my hard drive might be dying so I bought a new one (7200 rpm). That didn't help. My last resort is going to be upgrade to 4g (money is tight at the moment so I will have to wait a little while for that.) However, I think 2 gb should be enough for most stuff. What would you suggest might be the culprit?

2 GB should be (barely) enough for what you're doing, although not anything heavier. Are you seeing any rogue processes hogging CPU in Activity Monitor? Are you restarting somewhat regularly (with little RAM, you will eventually start swapping if you don't)?

An upgrade to 4 GB is pretty cheap and will make a big difference, though.

 

[jenzjen]

Are those apps the ones you use most, ie Safari, iTunes and Mail? While more RAM is always better, 2GB should be more than fine for those unless there's other RAM hungry apps you use?

You can do 1 of 2 things, troubleshoot exactly what's going on or, what I normally do, is just backup the files I want to keep and do a clean install of the OS.

 

[ToddJ]

Ok I finally ordered 4th of memory to replace the two...However, my computer with the 2gb is almost unusable....is there anything else I could do short of a clean install?