Here you can free up RAM with just one button. When you install CleanMyMac X, click on the Maintenance tab in the sidebar. I highly recommend CleanMyMac X, which will not only clean and speed up your Mac, it also has a RAM monitoring tool called Menu App. A high number here is very bad and a sure sign that your Mac doesn’t have enough RAM.Īnother alternative, which will work easily on all versions of Mac OS X, is to use a 3rd party tool to check your RAM usage. Page Outs – This number tells you how often your Mac has run out of RAM and needed to use the slower hard disk instead. If you’ve got a bunch of applications open and there is still a good number of free RAM, then your Mac may have enough memory. You’ll want to look for Free and Page Outs.įree – This is how much free RAM your Mac currently has. Older OS X versions like Leopard and Lionįor older versions of Mac OS X the steps are the same but the System Memory tab looks a bit different. If there is a lot of red, your memory is under strain and your Mac has a high memory usage. If there is a lot of yellow, the jury is still out.

If there is mostly green, your system RAM is currently fine. Memory Pressure is the graph you need to study. Click on the “ Memory” tab on the top of the window.When you are in the middle of normal daily tasks, follow these steps. You should check your Mac RAM after you have been using your Mac for a bit of time. Note: Not all devices are able to upgrade RAM, like the MacBook Air and the 2014 edition of the Mac Mini.Ĭhecking your RAM is dependent on the version of macOS that you have installed. The obvious solution would be to increase Mac RAM, but before we show you how to do that, let’s make sure that your lack of RAM is actually the cause of your Mac slowdown. The more RAM available, the better your Mac is able to execute on the tasks that are being thrown at it. Your Mac slows down when it experiences high memory usage, in other words, when the running applications demand more RAM than your Mac is able to provide. This memory is temporary and used by the CPU to hold information that processes are actively using on your system. Is your Mac slowing down? Do you spend more and more time waiting for applications to do what you want? If so, there is a very good chance that you have high memory usage and need a Mac RAM upgrade. But to help you do it all by yourself, we’ve gathered our best ideas and solutions below.įeatures described in this article refer to the MacPaw site version of CleanMyMac X. So here's a tip for you: Download CleanMyMac to quickly solve some of the issues mentioned in this article.

How to update my mac laptop