Lowering Macbook memory use

If you picked up a 10.4.x macbook with the 512mb thinking that it would be more than enough then you probably found your MacOSX running a little slower than expected. This was the case for me and when I ran the Activity Monitor (Applications > Utilities > Activity Monitor) I quickly saw that my system had about 8mb of free memory.

Although the Activity Monitor will show you exactly what software is taking up your precious memory, here are the two things that I did to help.

1) disable all of my widgets
2) used the Font Book to deactivate all Asian fonts

That helped me free up about 100mb of memory though I am sure a better solution would be to dish out the $$ and get some more memory.