Yeah, that spinning beach ball looks all happy and fun, but the diabolical critter’ll make your system slower than the line at the central Los Angeles DMV on a late Friday afternoon. Not to worry — FreeMemory is here to help.
No, the free app won’t kick the little swine out to sea — but at least it’ll let you deflate it somewhat by keeping close tabs on the status of your RAM.
That’s because much of that spinning is often caused by a lack of available RAM. Much like the Activity Manager app that comes with every Mac, FreeMemory reports exactly how much memory is free; unlike AM, FreeMemory sits in your menu bar, making it much easier to access. Clicking on the figure also tells you how much memory is inactive (memory recently used), active (memory used by active processes) and wired (which is used by the system itself and can’t be altered by quitting/starting apps).
Armed with this info, you should be easily able to see which apps are laying low and which are resource hogs. Happy deflating.
When he was eight, Eli Milchman came home from frolicking in the Veld one day and was given an Atari 400. Since then, his fascination with technology has made him an intrepid early adopter of whatever charming new contraption crosses his path. He calls San Francisco home, where he works as a journalist and photographer. Eli has contributed to the pages of Wired.com and BIKE Magazine, among others. Hang with him on Twitter.
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