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xcfamily

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Jan 22, 2011
3
0
I happened to have the activity monitor running on my IMac and MacBook at the same time. The activity monitor shows that most of the process' on the MacBook take up significantly more memory than the IMac. Why? Both machines were purchased the same year. They are both running the same system (10.6.6). They are both Intel Core 2 Duo. They both have 1gig mem.

any ideas?
 
What processes are they and what are you doing? It's understandable that Safari with 20 tabs uses more RAM than Safari with 3 tabs.
 
I happened to have the activity monitor running on my IMac and MacBook at the same time. The activity monitor shows that most of the process' on the MacBook take up significantly more memory than the IMac. Why? Both machines were purchased the same year. They are both running the same system (10.6.6). They are both Intel Core 2 Duo. They both have 1gig mem.

any ideas?

Perhaps if you showed us screenshots we would be able to understand your problem a bit more.
 
Processes

MacBook
Activity Monitor - 31.2MB
Airport Base Station Agent - 17.3MB
Mail - 52.1MB
Dock - 18MB
SystemUIServer - 29.9MB
Loginwindow - 20.6MB

IMac
Activity Monitor - 15.2MB
Airport Base Station Agent - 5.4MB
Mail - 39.5MB
Dock - 9.5MB
SystemUIServer - 10.2MB
Loginwindow - 9MB

Most every process. Computers were basically turned on and that is it.
 
Screen Shots

here are the screen shots. You can tell which one is the macbook. Just look for larger memory usage.
 

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While I don't have a quick answer for the OP, I'd say that regardless you should be thinking about adding RAM to both - it's very very cheap right now.

8 Gb kits (2 x 4Gb) are about $100 right now.

Running with 1Gb RAM is just not worth it these days - upgrade.
 
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