In my job, I often get asked, “How much memory should I get for my Mac?”. To answer that question, you have to understand how you use your Mac. One great way to figure that out, if you currently use a Mac, is to take a look at the Activity Monitor application, which is in your Utilities Folder. Activity Monitor will tell you all kinds of useful things, including how much memory each application and each process is taking to run, and how much free memory is left. Apple has produced a really nice Knowledgebase Article that explains how to interpret the memory information you see in Activity Monitor. You should stop everything and read it now. Here’s the link:

http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=107918

By the way, have you noticed that when I run across interesting Apple Knowledgebase Articles, I bookmark them with del.icio.us? You can see my collection of bookmarked kbase articles by visiting this URL:

http://del.icio.us/pmarkham/applekbase

–Pete