Why is my memory used so high?

Question

I bought a new macbook air with 8gb of rat and 512gb HD and 1.4 GHz Intel Core i5. For some reason my Memory Used is super high even though I barely have anything open. It's been running pretty slow. Even when I hit the F3 button to view all my pages, it's super laggy. Any idea?

Answer 1

Quit Chrome and try using Safari. Why do you think it is running slow?
Pre-Mavericks
Open Activity Monitor in the Utilities folder.  Select All Processes from the Processes dropdown menu.  Click twice on the CPU% column header to display in descending order.  If you find a process using a large amount of CPU time (>=70,) then select the process and click on the Quit icon in the toolbar.  Click on the Force Quit button to kill the process.  See if that helps.  Be sure to note the name of the runaway process so you can track down the cause of the problem.
Mavericks and later
Open Activity Monitor in the Utilities folder.  Select All Processes from the View menu.  Click on the CPU tab in the toolbar. Click twice on the CPU% column header to display in descending order.  If you find a process using a large amount of CPU time (>=70,) continuously, then select the process and click on the Quit icon in the toolbar.  Click on the Force Quit button to kill the process.  See if that helps.  Be sure to note the name of the runaway process so you can track down the cause of the problem.