Activity Monitor: What Is Free, Wired, Active, Inactive, and Used Memory in RAM


Understanding Memory Use with Activity Monitor (from MacMost.com).

You can use Activity Monitor to see how your Mac is using memory. But what do free, active, inactive and wired mean? How about page ins and page outs? Plus, learn to use them to figure out if you need more memory.

"Free memory" is the amount of memory you have available in system memory or RAM.

"Wired memory" is the hardware memory that your computer needs to use at a minimum to operate.

"Active memory" is the amount of memory that is being used in RAM right now.

"Inactive memory" is an amount of memory that might have just been used

"Used memory" is the total of all used memory -- Wired, Active, and Inactive

"Free memory" plus "Used memory" equals the size of your installed RAM memory.

If you see a lot of "Page outs", that means that your RAM is overloaded and you computer needs to use a lot of Virtual Memory -- swapping memory on the hard drive.

"Page ins" is memory being used in RAM. Page outs -- memory from outside the System Memory or RAM memory.

"Swap used" is how much virtual memory is being used.

VM size is the disk space available in your hard drive. The amount can be used to swap memory as needed to run and application or process.

New Samsung Galaxy Makes Buz That Makes Apple Appear to Be Following


Samsung introduced its new smartphone, the Galaxy S-4 at New York's Radio City Music Hall on Thursday. The phone is seen as a contender to potentially become the top-selling smartphone.

Biggest news is Air Gesture -- touchless control of the screen.

Larger, sharper screen -- a 5-inch (130 mm) Pentile RG–BG Full HD Super AMOLED screen with 441 pixels per inch.

Front and Rear cameras can work simultaneously. The rear camera is a  a 13-megapixel back camera.


The Galaxy S4 uses Google's Android mobile operating system with its custom TouchWiz "Nature UX" graphical user interface (GUI).  The Galaxy S4version sold in the United States will contain a 1.9 GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon 600 APQ8064T processor.

First, it will be interesting to see how many complaints of accidental commands arising from use of this phone.  Imagine your fingers accidentally dialing someone at midnight when your putting your phone in the charger. Hmmm ... Apple iPhone 4s and now the Samsung Galaxy S4. It's a palindrome, sort of.

Official website ...