Am I stuck with slow Mavericks?

Question

I am running Mavericks on an older (late 2009) MacBook Air. When I upgraded to Mavericks awhile back, I found that my machine was heating up fairly often and performed tasks extremely slow. I figured out that the memory was constantly full. I read that Mavericks was supposed to improve memory use with the new memory compression, but I find Mavericks to be using up more memory than Lion. (For the record, the memory is still almost full when I do simple tasks and only run one app at a time.) To try to resolve the issue, I did a clean install last night. The OS runs a little more smoothly, but the memory is still almost full most of the time.
Since it is an older machine, my computer came stock with only 2GB RAM. I realize there isn't much of an option to add more RAM and so I should buy a newer machine. But I need this one to last me for at least another year.
I figured I would ask the Apple community about whether I should try to go backwards to 10.7 or just stick it out with Mavericks until I can buy a new MacBook?

Answer 1

EtreCheck version: 1.9.11 (43) - report generated June 7, 2014 at 9:41:53 PM GMT+2
Hardware Information:
          MacBook Air (Mid 2009)
          MacBook Air - model: MacBookAir2,1
          1 1.86 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo CPU: 2 cores
          2 GB RAM
Video Information:
          NVIDIA GeForce 9400M - VRAM: 256 MB
System Software:
          OS X 10.9.3 (13D65) - Uptime: 0 days 6:19:36
Disk Information:
          SAMSUNG HS12UHE disk0 : (120.03 GB)
                    EFI (disk0s1) <not mounted>: 209.7 MB
                    Macintosh HD (disk0s2) / [Startup]: 119.17 GB (106.72 GB free)
                    Recovery HD (disk0s3) <not mounted>: 650 MB
USB Information:
          Apple Inc. Built-in iSight
          Apple Inc. Apple Internal Keyboard / Trackpad
          Apple Computer, Inc. IR Receiver
          Apple Inc. BRCM2046 Hub
                    Apple Inc. Bluetooth USB Host Controller
Gatekeeper:
          Mac App Store and identified developers
Launch Daemons:
          [loaded] com.adobe.fpsaud.plist Support
User Login Items:
          iTunesHelper
          Dropbox
Internet Plug-ins:
          FlashPlayer-10.6: Version: 13.0.0.214 - SDK 10.6 Support
          Flash Player: Version: 13.0.0.214 - SDK 10.6 Support
          QuickTime Plugin: Version: 7.7.3
          Default Browser: Version: 537 - SDK 10.9
Safari Extensions:
          Searchme: Version: 1.3
Audio Plug-ins:
          BluetoothAudioPlugIn: Version: 1.0 - SDK 10.9
          AirPlay: Version: 2.0 - SDK 10.9
          AppleAVBAudio: Version: 203.2 - SDK 10.9
          iSightAudio: Version: 7.7.3 - SDK 10.9
iTunes Plug-ins:
          Quartz Composer Visualizer: Version: 1.4 - SDK 10.9
3rd Party Preference Panes:
          Flash Player  Support
          TeXDistPrefPane  Support
Time Machine:
          Time Machine not configured!
Top Processes by CPU:
              10%          WindowServer
               6%          Safari
               3%          com.apple.WebKit.Networking
               2%          hidd
               1%          cookied
Top Processes by Memory:
          174 MB          com.apple.WebKit.WebContent
          115 MB          Safari
          82 MB          PluginProcess
          51 MB          Finder
          39 MB          com.apple.WebKit.Networking
Virtual Memory Information:
          36 MB          Free RAM
          699 MB          Active RAM
          676 MB          Inactive RAM
          297 MB          Wired RAM
          532 MB          Page-ins
          48 MB          Page-outs