Spread around your ram usage?

I just got my macbook this week and love it. the only thing is i got the 2 gb but decided to wait to upgrade to 4gb. now i multitask alot (safari 3 or 4 tabs, itunes, trasmission, aim,) so because of that i have recieved the spinning beach ball a few times. so recently when i got the becah ball i clicked widgets and looked at istat and it said that i still had a little less than half or my ram available to use, but i still get the beach ball. so is there any way to spread out my ram so i use it all and avoid the beach ball instead of using only half and getting the beach ball?

edit: oh i forgot to ask this since its not anything to do with my memory but my macbook has been plugged in all day and it says charged but only shows 98%. why is that?

 

With regards to the battery, it only shows 98% because the batteries are designed to be charged only when drops below 96%.

I too would like to know about the memory as i recently upgraded to 4gb and get the beach ball sometimes too.

 

Long explanation that I found around in the web that might interest you ....

Each application has an event queue which receives events from the operating system (for example key presses and mouse button clicks). If an application takes too long to process the events in its event queue (regardless of the exact cause) the operating system displays the wait cursor whenever the cursor hovers over that application's windows.

This is meant to indicate that the application is temporarily unresponsive, a state from which the application may recover, however it may also indicate that the application has entered an unrecoverable state.

While one application is unresponsive, typically other applications are usable in the meantime and may be used until the former becomes responsive again.

Possible causes include:

* Applications often do not poll for events during operations requiring intense processing. Sometimes developers do not poll simply because the operation should take less time than the operating system's threshold for displaying the spinning wait cursor, but the operation takes longer than the developer anticipated. An application that has stopped polling events during an operation will usually recover once the operation is complete.
* Bugs in applications can cause them to stop responding to events; for instance, an infinite loop. Applications that do this rarely recover.
* Problems with the virtual memory system such as slow paging caused by a spun-down hard disk (or, potentially, read errors) will cause the wait cursor to appear. In this case, multiple applications will display the wait cursor as they attempt to access memory that must be paged in until the hard disk and virtual memory system recover.

So as you can see, there's actually a number of reasons why you might be getting the spinning beach ball, and might not relate entirely to your RAM.

There might be some one to help you with configuring page in / page outs and managing virtual memory for your macbook. I'm presently unaware of how to advance configure memory options.

Hope this answers some of your questions ...

 

In any case, I highly doubt youll ever get rid of the beachball. It's just like in windows, how you have the hourglass. Computers are fast, but they're not super duper fast.

Though I don't think its anything to worry about, even in windows you get the hourglass. For me, it doesn't affect me when get a beachball, not like the computer grinds to a halt or anything.

 

good find! that was pretty interesting zambie thanks. i just wish i knew how to manage the virtual memory too lol. it almost as if the other 1gb of my memory is being wasted.