A friend called and his problem is that upon booting his iMac he gets a warning that he is low on memory and it tells him to "free up some memory please close a few applications". He has 8GB of RAM and Activity Monitor doesn't show anything special with the Finder and associated apps using 2.5GB or so of RAM. He can close the dialog box and everything seems to be OK but I've done tech support for a long time and never seen this. He has no backup from which to boot. I'm telling him to boot into diagnostics (D key or option-D ?) and see if the RAM is good. Any thoughts?
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RAM issue
- Thread starter santa
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Have him look at his startup items. He may be running a bunch of stuff in startups that's sucking up his memory. A good way to test is have him reboot to Safe Mode to see if he's getting the same message. Also ask if he's running any AV software. Another thing that can cause that is not closing apps when shutting down or rebooting.
Memory in Act Monitor looked fine. No startups sucking memory. He was also getting a notice that he needed to sign in to the Apple Store every time he booted. I told him to find his password and sign in. He finally did so and the notice about being low on memory stopped. Go figure.
I heard of malware that behaved exactly like this. Do you have a screenshot of this low memory warning, to see if it's legit? If not, I would recommend to change the Apple ID password at once.