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The biggest sign that your computer’s RAM is full is that it will start getting slower and slower. If left unchecked, it can become so sluggish that performing an action takes ages. In extreme cases, it might even crash. For modern workflows, 8GB RAM used to be the sweet spot, but apps these days have become larger and more demanding, so it has become the bare minimum. 16GB is the new sweet spot for comfortable multitasking workflows.
In the old days (before July 2025), the advice was simple: Get more RAM. However, it’s a little more complicated than that these days, especially if you’re looking for the DDR5 variety. With the surge in demand for AI, AI data centers need RAM more than ever before. This has caused many manufacturers to cut production on consumer-grade RAM, causing prices to skyrocket.
But what if I told you you might not need more RAM? You just need to learn to manage the one you already have. There are many things that can cause your computer to become sluggish, but you can easily find out if it’s RAM by looking in the Memory column of the Processes tab in Task Manager on Windows and the Memory tab of Activity Monitor on Mac. From there, it’s just a matter of taking some quick actions to ensure that the RAM utilization goes down. Also, just be on the lookout for signs that your RAM is failing.
Restarting is a quick and dirty way to free up RAM
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RAM is temporary storage, which is why it’s commonly referred to as your computer’s short-term storage. It’s where your computer temporarily stores instructions, data, and apps that it needs to access quickly. So when you type a sentence and then switch to a browser tab to grab a citation, that quick switching is because the computer has stored the apps in memory. When it gets full, it starts using your computer’s storage drive, which is slower, and that’s why things start becoming sluggish.
Unfortunately, there’s no button you can click to clear the RAM and start afresh. You also may not have the time to micromanage each open app. But one thing that does that is restarting the computer. RAM is volatile memory, so the moment the computer cuts off power, everything that was stored in it is lost, giving it a reset. Once the computer starts up again, it should be faster, especially if you’ve done all the other steps we’ll mention later.
Also, if you notice a process like Windows Explorer taking up too much RAM, it’s a memory leak. This happens when an app or process doesn’t release RAM when it’s done using it, leading to high utilization. Restarting the computer helps, but if you don’t want to sit through the startup process, you can just restart the process in Task Manager.
You also need to watch those browser tabs and apps
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Browser tabs are one of the biggest problems that use a lot of RAM since each one is a separate process with its own memory allocation. While some tabs can consume less than 100MB of memory, some take up more than 300MB or 1GB, quickly bottlenecking your RAM. So when you notice that your computer is acting sluggish because of your browser, it’s worth closing tabs you’re not using to speed things up. Target the tabs that are using the most memory, and you can check this in the browser’s task manager. In Chrome and Edge, you can open it by clicking the three dots in the top-right corner and going to More Tools > Task Manager.
Sometimes, it could be that you have many apps open. Some you’ve opened but forgot to close, and are now keeping memory hostage that you can use for something else. So just close the ones you don’t need and only keep the ones you’re using. If you notice that your computer is taking longer to load during startup, it could be due to startup apps, which open the moment you log into your computer. These may cause your computer to run low on RAM from the start. You can disable them in the Startup tab in Task Manager on Windows. On a Mac computer, go to System Settings > General > Login Items & Extensions and remove apps from the Open at Login list.
