Question about my RAM usage...

[swmr]

I hope I post this picture correctly.

Can somebody take a look at my iStat widget? I have only shut down my computer once since I bought it last Tuesday, and I did a restart one time. Usually I just put it to sleep. The thing bothering me is the amount of free RAM I have. Out of two GB, shouldn't I have more. You can see the only open apps I have are Finder, Firefox, iTunes, and iChat. I know that these happen to be relatively large programs, but a few days ago I have at least a full GB of free RAM when my laptop is idling.

What exactly is all that Inactive Memory? Will that be used if I run out of "free" memory?

I hope somebody can give me some more information.

Edit: Oh yea, and ignore my to do list haha...

 

[swmr]

Hasn't been too long but the thread got bumped back a few pages. Does anybody have an answer for me? I don't know if I should be worried about it or not...

 

[Blubbert]

Like you said in your first post, inactive memory is what is used when your entire free memory is used up. Basically inactive memory is memory that applications released. Its kept as inactive memory in case an application requests the same data again. This way, the applications are faster.

 

[swmr]

Okay that seems alright. I was just thinking that maybe it was wasted RAM, and I wondered why I was not getting my full 2GB. Thanks for the help.