How Do I Free Up Memory On My Macbook Pro



So let’s see how to quickly free up memory with just one click using the FreeMemory app. Installation and Setup. FreeMemory can be downloaded from the Mac App Store. It’s a small file and should take under a minute to download. Installing is easy, just run the app and you’ll see your current amount of free memory on your menu bar. Malware creators are looking for new sneaky ways of infecting Macs. Even such a genuine-looking pop-up alert as “Your computer is low on memory” can be a part of their dodgy tactics. Today, I’ll show you how to detect a pop-up virus on your Mac, get rid of it, and keep your computer as safe as possible. Let’s get started! Remove all your Login Items to speed up your MacBook Pro. Repair your drive using Disk Utility. Small corruptions in your MacBook Pro hard disk can cause all manner of performance problems. Fortunately, they’re usually easy to fix thanks to Apple’s Disk Utility application. Open Disk Utility from the Utilities folder in Applications.

How to clean up a MacBook Pro. Follow these best ways to clean up MacBook hard drive: 1. First, you should clear cache files. Depending on the computer, caches can occupy anything from a couple of gigabytes to 10 or even 20 gigabytes. Clean Up Your Desktop Another thing you can do to speed up your MacBook Pro is to clean up your desktop. By putting icons in folders instead of having them each on the desktop screen individually, it can save RAM which will speed up your computer. Once you have organized your desktop, restart the computer to notice the change in speed.

Optimised Storage helps you save storage space by storing your content in iCloud and making it available on demand:

  • When storage space is needed, files, photos, films, email attachments and other files that you rarely use are stored in iCloud automatically.
  • Each file stays exactly where you last saved it, and will download when you open it.
  • Files that you’ve used recently remain on your Mac, along with optimised versions of your photos.

If you haven't yet upgraded to macOS Sierra or later, find out about other ways to free up storage space.

Find out how much storage is available on your Mac

Choose Apple menu  > About This Mac and then click Storage. Each segment of the bar is an estimate of the storage space used by a category of files. Move your pointer over each segment for more detail.

Click the Manage button to open the Storage Management window, pictured below.

Manage storage on your Mac

Pro

The Storage Management window offers recommendations for optimising your storage. If some recommendations have already been turned on, you will see fewer recommendations.

Store in iCloud

Click the Store in iCloud button and then choose from these options:

  • Desktop and Documents. Store all files from these two locations in iCloud Drive. When storage space is needed, only the files you recently opened are kept on your Mac, so that you can work offline easily. Files only stored in iCloud will display a download icon , which you can double-click to download the original file. Find out more about this feature.
  • Photos. Store all original, full-resolution photos and videos in iCloud Photos. When storage space is needed, only space-saving (optimised) versions of photos are kept on your Mac. To download the original photo or video, just open it.
  • Messages. Store all messages and attachments in iCloud. When storage space is needed, only the messages and attachments you recently opened are kept on your Mac. Find out more about Messages in iCloud.

Storing files in iCloud uses the storage space in your iCloud storage plan. If you reach or exceed your iCloud storage limit, you can either buy more iCloud storage or make more iCloud storage available. iCloud storage starts at 50 GB for $0.99 (USD) a month, and you can purchase additional storage directly from your Apple device. Find out more about the prices in your region.

Optimise Storage

Click the Optimise button to save space by automatically removing films and TV programmes you've watched. When storage space is needed, films or TV programmes that you've purchased from Apple and have already watched will be removed from your Mac. Click the download icon next to a film or TV programme to download it again.

Your Mac will also save space by only keeping recent email attachments on this Mac when storage space is needed. You can manually download any attachments at any time by opening the email or attachment, or saving the attachment to your Mac.

Optimising storage for films, TV programmes and email attachments doesn't require iCloud storage space.

Empty Bin Automatically

Empty Bin Automatically permanently deletes files that have been in the Bin for more than 30 days.

Reduce Clutter

Reduce Clutter helps you identify large files and files you may no longer need. Click the Review Files button and then choose any of the file categories in the sidebar, such as Applications, Documents, Music Creation or Bin.

You can delete the files in some categories directly from this window. Other categories show the total storage space used by the files in each app. You can then open the app and decide whether to delete files from within it.

Find out how to re-download apps, music, films, TV programmes and books.


Where to find the settings for each feature

The button for each recommendation in the Storage Management window affects one or more settings in other apps. You can also control these settings directly within each app.

  • If you're using macOS Catalina or later, choose Apple menu  > System Preferences, click Apple ID, and then select iCloud in the sidebar: Store in iCloud turns on the Optimise Mac Storage setting on the right. To turn off iCloud Drive entirely, deselect iCloud Drive.
  • If you're using macOS Mojave or earlier, choose Apple menu > System Preferences, click iCloud, then click Options next to iCloud Drive. Store in iCloud turns on the Desktop & Documents Folders and Optimise Mac Storage settings.
  • In Photos, choose Photos > Preferences and then click iCloud. Store in iCloud selects iCloud Photos and Optimise Mac Storage.
  • In Messages, choose Messages > Preferences, then click iMessage. Store in iCloud selects Enable Messages in iCloud.
  • If you're using macOS Catalina or later, open the Apple TV app, choose TV > Preferences from the menu bar, then click Files. Optimise Storage selects “Automatically delete watched films and TV programmes”.
  • In you're using macOS Mojave or earlier, open iTunes, choose iTunes > Preferences from the menu bar, then click Advanced. Optimise Storage selects “Automatically delete watched films and TV programmes”.
  • In Mail, choose Mail > Preferences from the menu bar and then click Accounts. In the Account Information section on the right, Optimise Storage sets the Download Attachments menu to either Recent or None.

Empty Bin Automatically: From the Finder, choose Finder > Preferences, then click Advanced. Empty Bin Automatically selects “Remove items from the Bin after 30 days”.

Other ways that macOS automatically helps to save space

With macOS Sierra or later, your Mac will take these additional steps automatically to save storage space:

  • Detects duplicate downloads in Safari, keeping only the most recent version of the download
  • Reminds you to delete used app installers
  • Removes old fonts, languages and dictionaries that aren't being used
  • Clears caches, logs and other unnecessary data when storage space is needed

How to free up storage space manually

Even without using the Optimised Storage features described in this article, you can take other steps to make more storage space available:

  • Music, films and other media can use a lot of storage space. Find out how to delete music, films and TV programmes from your device.
  • Delete other files that you no longer need by moving them to the Bin, then emptying the Bin. The Downloads folder is good place to look for files that you may no longer need.
  • Move files to an external storage device.
  • Compress files.
  • Delete unneeded email: In the Mail app, choose Mailbox > Erase Junk Mail. If you no longer need the email in your Deleted Items mailbox, choose Mailbox > Erase Deleted Items.

Learn more

  • The Storage pane of About This Mac is the best way to determine the amount of storage space available on your Mac. Disk Utility and other apps may show storage categories, such as Not Mounted, VM, Recovery, Other Volumes, Free or Purgeable. Don't rely on these categories to understand how to free up storage space or how much storage space is available for your data.
  • When you duplicate a file on an APFS-formatted volume, that file doesn't use additional storage space on the volume. Deleting a duplicate file only frees up the space required by any data that you might have added to the duplicate. If you no longer need any copies of the file, you can recover all of the storage space by deleting both the duplicate and the original file.
  • If you're using a pro app and Optimise Mac Storage, find out how to make sure your projects are always on your Mac and able to access their files.

You still remember the first thing on your mind when you were buying your new MacBook that this Machine will always keep up with your pace and will never slow down on you. That’s exactly what these awesome machines are built to do. But sooner than you think, it starts slowing down. The first thing you need to know is that the performance of your Mac depends a lot on the memory usage on the device. We will talk about some of the ways to learn how to reduce memory usage on Mac and get it to maximum performance again.

Check Your Available Memory Usage on Mac First!

All the applications developed for use on Apple Machines are built to optimally use the memory available. But memory management for MacBook becomes critical when you open too many applications that are running simultaneously. This results in major memory overload.

Once you experience your Mac slowing down, you should start analyzing the memory usage. If you don’t know how to check memory usage on Mac, the best application to start with is the Activity Monitor. You can easily find this application in the Utilities or you can simply type the name of the application in the Spotlight window.

Activity Monitor: Helpful Tool in Analyzing Memory Usage on Your Mac

Activity Monitor is a built-in application in MacOS which tells you everything that is running on your MacBook. It gives you a complete overview of your MacBook’s memory usage. Here you can find out what applications are currently running and how much memory is being utilized by each of the applications. It is an excellent tool in analyzing the memory usage as it gives you plenty of details on the resources being consumed by any application, including the memory being used, Number of threads utilized by each app, CPU usage, etc.

What's more, ths Activity Monitor shows how you can add different columns to check a particular resource being utilized by an application and play with the statistics to shut down what you don’t need and that eats too much of memory. To illustrate a few, let’s have a look at the memory page of Activity Monitor.

The memory page is very informative when you understand all that it is showing to you;

Memory Pressure: This graph gives you the usage of memory over a period of time. You can set the Update Frequency and set the intervals. The right-most bar is the current memory usage, going back in time as you move to the left of the graph. The color of the graph shows the usage level.

  • Green – RAM Memory available.
  • Yellow – RAM Memory still available, tasked by memory-management processes (like Compression)
  • Red – RAM Memory completely used. This is the time where you should start shutting down some apps.

You can see the total installed RAM on your computer shown as,

Physical Memory: Total memory installed.

The part which you are really concerned about is the one marked as,

Mac Clear Memory

Memory Used: Total memory being used by the running apps and processes. Getting inside to have a deeper understanding of the memory distribution allows you to play with it and get the best performance.

  • App Memory: Total memory used by all the apps/processes.
  • Wired memory: As the name suggests, this memory is (virtually) hard-wired and you cannot make any changes to the processes using this memory. These are usually the primary processes of your Machine and they need the memory with the quickest access and cannot be swapped with the memory on disk.
  • Compressed: The MacOS will compress a chunk of memory in the RAM to make more space for the utilization of other apps. You can see the column of compressed memory to see how much actual and compressed memory is used by each process or application.

Swap Used: The MacOS will utilize some space on the disk drive of your Mac. This is used to free up physical space on RAM for the applications requiring more intense use of memory.

Cached Files: The MacOS keeps the recently closed applications as cached files for quick loading once you restart the same application. However, this memory is available to be used by any new application if the same application is not started.

Running out of Space? Try The Quick Fix to Free Up Memory Space Here

When you are running out of space on your Mac and your memory pressure graph is constantly in the red. Your computer is slowing down and if you are thinking about how do I free up memory on my Mac, using a powerful Mac cleanup software is the quickest fix for you. Umate Mac Cleaner is beyond compare your first choice for Mac cleaning software you will find and let me tell you why.

Umate Mac Cleaner is an amazingly powerful tool to clean and offers a one-click solution for releasing more memory. No important files will be deleted through Umate Mac Cleaner so you don’t have to worry about accidentally harming your Mac. Its one of the main features - Clean Up Junk is designed to delete all the junk files which are slowing down the Mac system. You can use the Clean Up Junk feature to run a Quick Clean first.

Quick Clean will run an automatic scan to search, identify and delete the unnecessary files piled up on your system. Deleting those junk files have no effect on system performance, so you can safely remove them without consideration.

Once the Quick Clean has done its job and you still feel the need to make some more space available, the Clean Up Junk lets you run a Deep Clean on the Mac. Deep Clean shows you the files available on the system which can be deleted to make more space available on the Mac. It runs a scan and finds the items that can be deleted, and you can now choose which of these files you want to permanently remove from the system, then hit the big Clean button to remove them with single click.

Another very useful feature of Umate Mac Cleaner to lower memory usage on Mac is Manage Application & Extensions. Naturally, there are a few applications lying around over the chunks of your memory and these applications are not even being used. These unused applications and unnecessary extensions are hogging on the memory bytes which are needed for the new and more frequent applications. This feature of Umate Mac Cleaner is how to save memory on Mac by uninstalling the rarely used applications and their associated files. Along with the unused applications, it also targets the unnecessary extensions which are installed in your Mac. This feature will list down the applications with their usage statistics and you can choose which ones to remove to lower memory usage on your Mac.

Getting Umate Mac Cleaner for Mac memory management is unbelievably easy. All you need to do is get the app from iMyFone, install and launch the app and let it do the rest automatically. The app comes with a very intuitive user interface and is compatible with Macbook/iMac running MacOS 10.15-10.9.

Other 7 Tips to Reduce Memory Usage on Mac Manually

Using a Mac cleaning tool to free up memory on Mac is much easiesr and faster. And this way is highly recommended for time-saving clean up. However, if you want to free up memory without using third-party software, here are other 7 extra tips for you to do the job manually. Let’s check them out together!

1. Clean up the Desktop

No matter what computer you are using, you know that your desktop is filled with unnecessary and unused icons scattered all around the screen. Don’t worry; this is what we do on all our computers. But if you want to lower the memory usage on your Mac, you might want to steer away from cluttering your desktop. This might come as a surprise, but MacOS allows your desktop icons to be treated as priority applications and it keeps all the desktop icons in the active memory. This takes up space in your RAM which you definitely want to save.

2. Manage Memory Usage in Finder

The Finder application on Mac can sometimes take up a lot of memory of your system. You are thinking that Finder should not be taking up this much space, right. It is probably because the Finder application is set to show all files available on the system. Try changing the default display of Finder to not show All My Files. This will work wonders for you.

3. Force Quit Memory-eating Processes

In the Activity Monitor, you can see which applications are consuming most of the memory. These memory-hogging processes are slowing down your system. You can select to Force Quit these processes to save memory on your Mac.

4. Delete Browser Extensions

Clear Mac Ram

The add-ons and extensions on the internet browser are nice tools for quick access to features you need while surfing the internet. But more often than not, they are consuming more memory than they are being helpful. You can save a lot of memory on your Mac by deleting the unwanted browser extensions. Just launch the browser on your Mac, like Safari, Chrome and Firefox, and then go to Preferences to remove those unwanted extensions on the Extensions tab.

Macbook Pro Memory Upgrade

You can use Umate Mac Cleaner to remove the undesired extensions. Just launch the app and go to Manage Applications and Extensions and the memory management tool will list down all the extensions for you to choose and delete. You will be surprised at how many of these extensions are not even needed in your Mac.

5. Close Unwanted Finder Windows

Opening a number of Finder windows takes up a lot of memory, and it is incredible how much memory you can save by this little tip. You don’t need anything fancy for this. A keyboard shortcut is all you need; press Command + Option + W to close all the open windows on your Mac.

6. Disable Login Items

The items that are set to launch on every login are going to use a lot of memory space. Most of these login items are not essentially required for your day to day computing needs and you can easily get rid of them. Here are the simple steps to do that: Click the Apple icon > select System Preferences > Click Users & Groups > Select the login item you want to remove, then click the Remove.

Using Umate Mac Cleaner to Disable Startup Items is your one-click solution to fix this issue. Select the items you want to disable on your next login and you will start your Mac with a bunch of memory saved.

7. Purge RAM in Terminal (for Advanced Users)

Open the terminal on your Mac and enter the command ‘sudo purge’. This feature requires admin rights so you would have to enter the password here then the system will clear the inactive memory. We strongly advise against using this method unless you know your way around your Machine.

If You Use Chrome Browser, Here's Bonus Tip to Lower Memory Usage

If you are using Google applications like Gmail, Google Drive, etc. This tip might be useful on how to lower memory usage on Mac. Google Chrome makes use of the system GPU for its processes to help load web pages super fast, however, this process takes a lot of memory on your system RAM. Fortunately, there is a way to control this. Use the Task Manager of Google Chrome to manage the memory available for use by Chrome, and you are good to go!

Anyway, You Should Keep Your Eye on Mac's Memory Usage

If your Mac is boosted up with 16 gigs of RAM memory, then you might have a lot of free space to use up for unnecessary applications. But with the basic 4 or 8GB RAM machine, you would require the monitoring more often. More applications running on the Mac means more memory usage. This makes it very important that you should keep a check on your applications. Learning to read and analyze the memory page of the Activity Monitor will be extremely useful in memory management for your Mac and keep your MacBook memory usage under check.

Conclusion

With these simple tips and tricks, you can bring your Mac back to its fast performance condition when the speed of your MacBook was unmatched to all the other computers. Using an application that can efficiently look after the system health will keep your Macbook hassle-free. Umate Mac Cleaner might just be the thing you were looking for, a application that comes with all-in-one package and all the features you need.