We receive a lot of queries each week about the finer points of using a Mac. Sometimes the questions are basic, and sometimes they're complex. When a question and its answer can benefit a wide range of Mac users, we sometimes post it here.
Screen shot courtesy of Coyote Moon, Inc.
This week's question came from Charlie, who has been using Activity Monitor to see how much memory his Mac is using. He wanted to know if adding more RAM to his iMac would result in better performance in iPhoto and some of his other favorite applications.
Charlie also asked about inactive memory. His iMac has very little free memory, but lots of inactive memory. He wondered if he could activate the inactive memory, and if so, how to do it.
All of these are good questions. You can find the answers in our guide to OS X Memory Usage.