Memory Usage On Powerbook

um... no. I think you should have alot more ram free. How are you finding out how much ram you have? Activity Monitor?

In Activity Monitor select system memory at the bottom, Show all processes in the drop down box at the top and look through all the programs and processes and see whats eating up your ram. Report back here and maybe someone can help

 

How long have you had it running? Have you copied a large number of files recently?

The reason I ask is that OS X will use any available RAM to cache files from the hard drive, so that programs, etc. will load faster (by reading them from memory rather than the (slower) disk). If you have copied a lot of files recently, or have had other applications open since the machine was last restarted, the cached copies will consume some RAM. If the Mac needs more space to run applications, it will automatically purge some files from the cache to make room. My guess is that if you reboot the computer, and then run just those applications you listed, you memory usage will be lower (because rebooting will clear the memory disk cache). Note that you don't have to reboot the computer to clear the cache all of the time, this is just a way to show the memory usage before a bunch of files get cached in RAM from disk.

You don't need to worry about getting more RAM unless the disk starts thrashing all of the time and the computer slows to a crawl when you are just running a normal number of applications - that means you're beginning to use the disk swap file because there is not enough RAM to contain your running applications. You shouldn't have trouble with 512MB of RAM though, unless you're doing 3D rendering or working on huge Photoshop files or something.

 

Thats ok. I wouldn't worry too much about 'free' memory. because OS X keeps a lot of memory as inactive. I have 768 MB ram, and usually only 20-30 mb is 'free'. And anyways, free memory is going waste.
Still, if you want to see more free memory, occasionally log out and re log in.
cheers