System Settings/Ram

Question

Under the System Settings, what are the best settings for;
Memory Usage
Application
Still Cache
Thumbnail Cache
Disk
Ram............?
1.5 gigs is all my computer supports.
One last thing. Would it be best to run FCP under a new user name. Since I can't add more ram. Logging out of the Administrator (Me). So that what other garbage I have running in the Administrator account doesn't run, and frees up more ram/processor.
I have read some post on this topic. But, seeing I can't add more ram. I'm asking for advice.

Answer 1

Running the computer under another account won't really help your ram usage. Many of these are background processes that are owned by the Root. You can not kill them. Don't worry, they do not take up much ram and little cpu headroom. If there are processes that you initiated and you are interested in squeezing the machine to make every last CPU cycle or byte of RAM available, go through your user processes and kill anything that is not necessary - for example - a palm pilot background sync process.
If you are curious, in Activity Monitor, set your display to Active Processes. You'd be surprised how few there are other than the apps you are currently working with.
Also, while you are in Activity Monitor, you can get a grip on how the ram is being used by keeping an eye on Page In/Outs in System Memory. Don't worry about the Ins. The outs indicate that the ram is being overwhelmed and is swapping data out to the virtual memory (a file on your system drive). A zero here indicates the work is all being done in RAM with no page outs to VM.
This does point out why it is important to not fill up your hard drive. The virtual memory file is invisible to you but can grow to multiple GB in size. When your disk fills with other junk, you reduce the head room for disk read/write operations but equally importantly, reduce the space for the virtual memory and this can cause a lock up aka frozen system.
good luck.
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