Why is my Mac running so slow? - Part Two

Welcome to Part Two of “Why is my Mac running so slow?” Previously, I wrote about the importance of having free space on your hard drive. Now, I’d like to go into another common reason for poor performance; not enough memory. In this case, I’m am talking about random access memory, or RAM, the solid-state, electronic memory your computer uses for temporary storage.

I know that for many of you the difference between RAM and hard drive space may not be entirely clear, so allow me to draw an analogy.

Imagine that your computer is like a desk, a special desk that allows you to work very quickly. The only caveat to using this desk is that, when you are done using it, you must leave nothing on the top of the desk, or else it will vanish.

Let’s say that you want to send a letter to someone. You reach into one of the desk’s drawers and put your typewriter on top. You also get a piece of paper out of the drawer to write your letter on. As you are typing, you think to yourself, “I want to send a picture along with this letter.” You get your paints out from the drawer and a canvas to go with it. Then, you really decide to go crazy and send along a recorded message, so you pull out a cassette recorder and a cassette and start talking.

When you are done, you not only have to put the typewriter, paints and tape recorder back into the drawers, you also have to put the letter, painting and tape in the drawers as well.

In this analogy the top of your desk is RAM and the drawers are your hard drive. When you start your computer, it first takes the operating system and copies it from the hard drive into memory. The same thing happens when you want to, say, write a letter. The computer “launches” (loads into memory) Microsoft Word. When you are done, you not only have to “quit” Word (purge it from memory), you have to save your new document to the hard drive.

It’s easy to see that the larger the top of your desk is, the more things you can do at once and the more efficiently you can work.

That’s why it’s important for your computer to have enough memory. Having lots of RAM allows you to have more applications running at the same time, lets you work with large documents (like big image files in Photoshop) and allows the operating system to work more

efficiently.

Here’s how to tell how much RAM you have in your computer. Go to the Apple menu in the upper left-hand corner of your screen and choose “About this Mac”. “Memory” refers to the amount of RAM installed in your Mac.

The amount of RAM required for best performance varies depending on what you use your computer for and what operating system you are running, however, 1 GB of RAM is a pretty good place to start for a modern Mac OS (10.4 - 6). The good news is that RAM is relatively inexpensive and can be installed by just about anyone. If you need more info or help with upgrading your memory, let me know.

Thanks for the read,

Your Genius