Macs are great. They don’t crash too much, and you don’t have to restart them too often. However, it’s still good to shut down & restart them regularly.

After doing a bunch of work in Photoshop/Illustrator/InDesign, I opened up my iStat Menus Memory panel, and found that my Mac was using 2.3GB of swap files! (I’ve seen it use even more than that sometimes). My 4GB of ram isn’t enough, so it had to save some things on my hard drive as well.

This can slow down your computer, and uses up hard drive space!

Even after quitting all the  programs I had open, the swap files just stuck around.

When I restart my computer (after writing this blog post), my Mac will clean out all it’s swap files, and I’ll gain a bonus 2.3GB of hard drive space! (which means a lot, when you’re the sort of person that just keep finding ways to use it all up)