Have you noticed lately that your MacBook isn’t working the way it used to? You hear the fan turn on a lot more and maybe start freezing when you have too many windows or browser tabs open. This is not the time to buy a brand new Mac or even upgrade internal hardware. Seems more like your RAM is the culprit.
Random access memory, or RAM, acts as storage for ongoing tasks and functions essential to modern computing. He is best known for his role in multitasking. If you are using most or all of your RAM, you may run into problems. While you may have been able to upgrade your Mac’s RAM before, many MacBooks today don’t allow it. My 2011 MacBook Air has 4GB of RAM and I’m stuck with it until I buy a new laptop.
Instead what you can do to somehow fix the problem is to use software tools to free up some RAM. Here are two good options.
Quick Fix: Memory Cleanup 2
My MacBook Air, which was once almost constantly silent, now spins the fan even when I only have a browser window and Messages open. After examining what could be the cause, I found that I only have 100MB to 500MB of usable RAM at any given time. So I looked for an easy solution and found one in the Mac App Store: Memory Clean 2.
With the click of a button, Memory Cleanup searches behind the scenes for areas where it can free up memory.
Memory Clean sounds exactly like it does, clearing your memory. You won’t lose any data or anything like that. The app shows a breakdown of how your Mac is using RAM and how much is available. With the click of a button, Memory Clean searches behind the scenes for areas where it can free up memory, and it does just that.
The app is free and I manage to clean between 100MB and 300MB on average every time I use it. You can always keep cleaning Clean until you release the amount you want after each cycle, but with each click the amount it can clear gets smaller.
I also recommend the $4.99 paid upgrade to “Extreme Clean” which tends to clean anywhere from 400MB to 700MB for me. It takes a few seconds longer to run, but once it passes, I can start to hear my MacBook’s fan slowing down. The only downside is that once you start doing other things on your Mac again, the RAM usage increases again.
Detailed Fix: Activity Monitor
If you want to do the job yourself and make more permanent changes to your RAM usage, use Activity Monitor. This is an app that comes with macOS that lets you monitor CPU usage, battery life, and memory, among other things.
Open Activity Monitor and Memory tab. At the top of the list, click Memory to sort processes by memory usage and make sure the ones that use the most are at the top. If you know the process or application that is taking up your RAM, Information icon and click check out ditch and to free that memory. Note that this will close the app.
There are lots of running processes here that you probably don’t recognize. You’d better leave them alone as they may be necessary for your Mac.
Once you understand which apps you don’t need in memory, you should prevent them from starting automatically at startup as well.
ALSO READ: How to Speed Up a Slow Mac
