How to Free up RAM on Windows & Mac Effectively? [10+ Ways]

What Is RAM

Your computer uses RAM to load data because it runs data much faster than it does directly from a hard drive. Usually, the more RAM your computer installs, the more programs you can run at once without affecting performance. Once your RAM is running out of usage, your system would be much slower or even can’t run at all.

Thus, it’s important to free up memory for speeding up your computer. How to get more RAM on Windows and Mac? Let’s keep reading.

Check What Eating up Your RAM

2. In the Processes tab, click on the Memory header to sort from most to least RAM usage.

3. To know more details, go to the Performance tab and click on Open Resource Monitor at the bottom to see a chart of the RAM usage over time.

  1. Go to your Applications folder and then select the Utilities
  2. Double click Activity Monitor to show all of your processes on Mac.
  3. Go to the Memory tab to see how much RAM is used by your programs.

How to Free up RAM on Windows

# 1. Restart Your PC

# 2. Uninstall or Disable Unnecessary Programs

# 3. Update Your Apps

# 4. Clear Cache

# 5. Switch to a Different Browser

# 6. Remove Browser Extensions

# 7. Scan for Malware

Step 3. Then you will see a list of advanced scans including Quick scan, Full scan, Custom scan, and Windows Defender Offline scan. To start a full system scan, select Full scan and click Scan now.

# 8. Adjust Virtual Memory

Step 1. Press Win + E keys to open the File Explorer, and then right-click This PC entry and select Properties.

Step 2. Click on the Advanced system settings on the right side of the window.

Step 5. Uncheck the box next to Automatically manage paging file size for all drives.

Step 6. Now, you will see the paging file size of your main drive, select Custom size, and then set the Initial size and Maximum size to higher values. Click on OK to save the change.

# 9. Reduce Visual Effects

Here’s how to increase memory on PC via turning off visual effects.

Step 1. Follow Step 1 to Step 3 in # 8 to open the Performance Options window.

Step 2. Tick the checkbox next to Adjust for the best performance. Then all the animated visual effects will be disabled in the settings.

# 10. Clear Page File When Shutting Down

Step 1. Press Win + R keys to open the Run box, and then type regedit in it and hit Enter. Then click on Yes to open Registry Editor.

Step 2. Go to the following registry key via the left navigation bar:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE/SYSTEM/CurrentControlSet/Control/Session Manager/ Memory Management

Step 3. With the Memory Management folder selected in the left panel, double click the ClearPageFileAtShutdown DWORD and set it Value data to 1, and click on OK.

# 11. Add More RAM

The first option is to use the Windows built-feature ReadyBoost along with a USB to increase RAM, while the other is to upgrade your RAM to a larger one. To do so, you can refer to the following guides:

How to Use USB as RAM to Speed Up Your Windows (ReadyBoost)How to Install RAM in Your PC — Here’s a Complete Guide

How to Free up RAM on Mac

In addition, you can take the following measures to free up memory on Mac.

# 1. Adjust the Finder Preferences

Step 1. Click on the Finder icon at the top left of your screen.

# 2. Check Activity Monitor

# 3. Reduce the Chrome’ RAM Usage

Step 2. Scroll down to the bottom of the screen and click on Advanced.

# 4. Disable Login Items

# 5. Disable Desktop Widgets

# 6. Use a RAM Cleaner

How to free up RAM on Windows 10 and Mac? We have discussed 10+ effective ways in the above. Now, you can try all of them or choose ones that work best for you.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Ariel is an enthusiastic IT columnist focusing on partition management, data recovery, and Windows issues. She has helped users fix various problems like PS4 corrupted disk, unexpected store exception error, the green screen of death error, etc. If you are searching for methods to optimize your storage device and restore lost data from different storage devices, then Ariel can provide reliable solutions for these issues.

Originally published at https://www.partitionwizard.com on March 22, 2022.

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