OWC 6Gig Memory in Mac Book Pro

[lloyd709]

I've just installed this and no matter how many apps I open, Activity Monitor (and iStat) always reports about 1.8 Gig Inactive Memory. I just spoke to OWC and they said that would be the case because Activity Monitor thinks the MacBook pro can only take 4 Gig. This seems strange to me because I wouldn't have thought Activity Monitor would be programed to only analyze the memory it thinks the specific computer should have - especially given it recognizes all 6 Gig.

If anyone else has this memory from OWC in their macbook pro I would be grateful if you could tell me whether your Activity Monitor is reporting the same thing or not.

Thanks

 

[CaptainChunk]

Inactive memory actually indicates a space in RAM that is actually in use, but hasn't been called upon recently. When another open application demands that memory, the previous information in inactive memory gets cached to disk if free memory isn't available.

It has nothing to do with amount of memory being recognized. Read this Apple support article.

 

[lloyd709]

Inactive memory actually indicates a space in RAM that is actually in use, but hasn't been called upon recently. When another open application demands that memory, the previous information in inactive memory gets cached to disk if free memory isn't available.

It has nothing to do with amount of memory being recognized. Read this Apple support article.

I had read that article before and thought I understood it but I don't think it explains why I ALLWAYS have 1.8 gig of inactive memory. To quote: 'When another open application demands that memory, the previous information in inactive memory gets cached to disk if free memory isn't available'. That statement implies to me that the other application is going to start using the inactive memory and hence surely the inactive memory should start to go down as it's used up - shouldn't it?

I'm making a big deal of this because my computed doesn't feel like it's got 6 gigs of memory - before I purchased this memory I had 3 gigs of memory and it feels like it's paging to disk as much as it did then.