Memory Problems

[smithy]

Hi - well ive had my emac for a month now its a G4 1.25 with 1gb of ram but like i dont think the ram is fully working properly. Like i was reading somewhere today that your ram might not work properly if its not put in properly or something it doesnt work properly but i probly doubt that cause the system is saying 1gb or ram so yer.

I always have activity monitor open and in the dock as the cpu monitor icon yanno just to see whats happening. but now and again i always look at the memory part like at the moment i have some music playing in itunes safari open aswell msn messenger and just talkin to a friend and i have activity monitor open and this is the details of memory in activity monitor

used: 615.36 Free: 408.19 Wired: 100.06 Active: 144.09 Inactive: 377.06

VM Size: 3.73 Page ins/outs: 52212/0 Ram is 1024mb

now whats pageins/outs cause i posted her earlier with this problem and someone said to check this and i didnt know where to find it until today because yer i dunno. But like its just abit weird cause i have a feeling its lagging to much like even my sister said it was. like in microsoft word it lags quite abit but when launching programs it seems pretty fast.

Like i could be worrying about nothing and its just this computer is slow cause i couldnt afford to get a powermac g5 or g4 or even an imac. but yer can someone like jus compare theres to mine or whatever cause im thinking about ringing apple or takin it back to the apple store and i jus want some opionions...

Thanks for reading

[Viro]

You're memory is fine. Symptoms of faulty memory are things like random crashes and kernel panics. You don't have those so it is highly unlikely that your memory is bad.

MS Word is poorly written on the Mac, especially the Word 2004. See here for proof http://www.barefeats.com/wp.html. Could you define lagging a bit more? If it is resizing windows, it will be 'lagging' because that's the way OS X is.

Your memory consumption is fine too. You've got over 400 MB of memory free, and in your used memory, 377 MB is inactive which means that it contains the files used by programs you just closed and it works like a disk cache and will help speed up program launch times.

[Viro]

No message.

[smithy]

Well like i dont really mind about microsoft word lagging so much cause i dont really use it alot. but like in system preferences it takes sometimes awhile to change to different preference panes and also sometimes like switching to the applications folder in finder but then again like everything seems to always runs smoothly like i use the dock with magnifying on and the genie effect and i use expose' alot and i have music always running and everything seems to multi task pretty good... ah well i think i wont worry about aymore thanks viro

but can u please tell me what are page ins/outs i have a feeling its about the files with programs like saving and stuff.... thanks again

[bobw]

http://www.osxfaq.com/dailytips/03-2002/03-14.ws

One of the keys to coaxing the best performance out of Mac OS X is to give it plenty of RAM. The more you have, the less sluggish things feel regardless of your processor's speed.

Mac OS X is kind of insidious about this. Unlike Mac OS 9, you'll never (almost never) see a "not enough memory to do that" type message. Mac OS X uses its own superior virtual memory scheme to allow you to run programs far beyond what can fit in that 128MB of RAM. But... (there's always a but...)

The way it does that trick is to "page out" parts of RAM to your hard disk, substituting space on your hard disk for the RAM you so desperately need. The thing is, RAM, being solid-state, is about seventeen thousand trillion times faster than any mechanical disk. And so, the more paging out you've got going on, the slower things get in Mac OS X.

As I told you a few Freeware Friday's ago in this space, the easy way to find out how much paging out is going on at any given time is to run MemoryStick (http://www.versiontracker.com/dyn/moreinfo/macosx/13636) with its Signal Pageouts option turned on. The more beeping you hear, the more additional RAM will speed up your particular Mac.

[fryke]

viro: The link's about Word X, not Word 2004. And: Word 2004 actually doesn't lag at all for me, so maybe we're talking about different Word 2004's?

SysPrefs sometimes does lag because it actually has to _load_ the individual pref.panes (they're actually some special form of individual applications). I find WinXP's preferences lag far more, so I don't understand a switcher's problems with SysPrefs - unless your Mac is SEVERELY messed up, what I don't believe.

[Viro]

fryke, look at the bottom of the page

[smithy]

Well im trying that program that bobw recommended and im just testing it with having all mx suite open with quite large files aswell as photoshop with a large image and i have word open with a blank document aswell as music playing and talking to another friend aswell as using expose'. Well expose' is like not running as fast but hey i cant blame it to but everything is running rather smoothly and the music hasnt jolted at all. and activity monitor says:

Wired: 96.79 Active: 211.35 Inactive: 623.20 Used: 931.39 Free: 91.12 Vm size: 5.46
Page ins/outs: 50037/0 and ive turned on that beeping thingy with memory stick and nothings happened i think or i couldnt hear it cause i have music playing lol....... so yer i think its running fine now.. i tthink i was just worrying about nothing... anyways bye