Ram Issues?

[Me1000]

so I have this widget that tells me how much ram i have free...

That was after a reboot!

So I open up the activity monitor
and it shows this

what does this mean?
Is it no big deal? or should I do something??

Kind of scary that right after a reboot the kernal is using over a gig of my memory!

 

[dpaanlka]

Kind of scary that right after a reboot the kernal is using over a gig of my memory!

It's not. It's using 82.46mb. Those are normal numbers, I don't know what's up with your widget unless you only have like 256mb of RAM or something.

Click on the "System Memory" tab at the bottom of that Activity Monitor window, combine "Inactive" and "Free" and that sum is your free memory.

 

[Me1000]

ok, well i have 2GB
my widget is now showing 42% free, (after I ran Photoshop! )

my free is at 1.15 and inactive around 390

so what does virtual memory mean in the activity monitor?

 

[dpaanlka]

ok, well i have 2GB
my widget is now showing 42% free, (after I ran Photoshop! )

my free is at 1.15 and inactive around 390

so what does virtual memory mean in the activity monitor?

I would think the widget is flawed - those numbers you gave mean that 75% of your physical memory is free. Virtual Memory is reserve hard drive space that apps are holding as "memory" they can use.

http://guides.macrumors.com/Virtual_memory

Also, is this an Intel system? Because running ANY PowerPC app (like Photoshop) eats a tremendous amount of RAM.

 

[Me1000]

yeah it is intel, but it was CS3 that i ran...