Use iFreeMem and never have to restart your mac again - or - I love green pie!

When I was considering purchasing a mac and ending (or rather, reducing) Microsoft's reign of terror in my life, I was told my multiple sources that one of the productivity boons of macs is that you never have to restart them due to memory getting eaten up by invisible gnomes in your chassis. The truth is that OSX definitely appears to do a better job, but it seems to leave memory scraps behind, just like windows.

I shelled out twenty bucks the other day for a little app called iFreeMem, which will - on demand - run through your ram and clean out any cruft, leaving you with a bigger green slice in that memory pie. I use it several times a day, and it seems to work really well even though I keep wondering if maybe the program just overrides the graphical display in activity monitor and makes you think you have more than you do.

iFreeMem also adds a nice little menubar icon that shows a monochrome pie-chart display of current memory usage. I find myself glancing up there when I'm using a bunch of programs at once to make sure I'm not going to be surprised by a spinning beach ball of death anytime soon.