MemoryStick

We've been using this on several Macs for years now. It's so valuable that it's set to automatically start on login for all our users. If your machine starts to get into trouble with an application hogging too much memory, you will see it immediately. The window can be formed to take up a tiny sliver of space, yet still give a complete graphical view of memory usage. It is particularly good for less technical users, yet shows details useful to sophisticated users as well. There seems to be no hit on system resources whatsoever. We've never had the first problem with this little application and the price is right - free. It's indispensable for us.

I've been using this for years. Now I'm told it will no longer work in Mojave. Is there anything later than the current version?

We've been using this on several Macs for years now. It's so valuable that it's set to automatically start on login for all our users. If your machine starts to get into trouble with an application hogging too much memory, you will see it immediately. The window can be formed to take up a tiny sliver of space, yet still give a complete graphical view of memory usage. It is particularly good for less technical users, yet shows details useful to sophisticated users as well. There seems to be no hit on system resources whatsoever. We've never had the first problem with this little application and the price is right - free. It's indispensable for us.

Version 1.5 IS Universal (Tiger & Leopard)

MemoryStick (v 1.3.4, now v 1.4) works well on my iMac G5. And the v1.3.4 also worked on several other iMacs I have tried (G3, G4). Has worked well in both Panther and Tiger 10.4.2, 10.4.3. It is a quick and simple way to keep track of the memory and swap file usage. Usually, when number of swap files go up, responsiveness goes down. FYI, here are the version 1.4 changes, from the help file: "Tiger-only Removed dependence on vm_stat Added ability to set loudness of sounds Removed sound options from menu Added standard Preferences menu item keyboard shortcut"

"Yet Mac OS X provides no equivalent to the "About This Mac" display of RAM usage that was present in earlier systems." except for top and /Applications/Utilities/Activity Monitor

... watch yourself. http://www.sony.com/memorystick/ don't want to have to rename the application.

I think Activity Monitor is too inflexible in terms of screen real estate, having a whole window running just to find out a couple small pieces of information, and you can only display one type of information in the Dock. The combination of MemoryStick and MenuMeters is far superior and totally unobtrusive, and they are both free. You could get away with just MenuMeters if you wanted, but I like Memory Stick's graphical report.

Yes, the new and improved Activity monitor can basically do what this MemoryStick does. But without the bells and whistles. Literally: MemoryStick can beep to warn you of swap-outs and additional swap files being created. MemoryStick also places a badge on its Dock icon indicating the number of swap files. This is tres important for some of us to know. (I've found that LiveType can go insane, filling the boot drive with dozens of swap files, so I want to KNOW when this kind of thing is occurring.) So I leave Activity Monitor showing CPU usage and MemoryStick showing memory/swap usage.

Mac OS X does provide this ability in Panther with the Activity Viewer utility. The description should be updated to reflect that.

It's Panther only.