Creativebits.org

an All Creative World site
Ivan's picture

Quit Finder

quit Finder

In some occasions you may be in a situation where you need every bit of memory you have in your machine. Finder eats quite a bit of memory (25MB+ of real memory and hundreds of megabytes of virtual memory). You may decide you want to stop the friendly face running temporarily to free up resources to finish up a huge Photoshop job or a video render.

To get full control over your Finder application, you can add a Quit menupoint to your Finder if you type this into Terminal:
defaults write com.apple.finder QuitMenuItem -bool yes

For this command to take effect you need log out (or force quit Finder for the last time). Now, you should see a Quit Finder command in your Finder. Just press Apple-Q (Cmd-Q) as you would with any other application. To get your Finder back just launch Finder.

Commenting on this Blog entry is closed.

mijlee's picture
501 pencils

This especially handy for me at home because until I can afford to upgrade i am still running a G4 PB Ti 400 which only has 384Mb ram and a measly 10Gb HD. Painful if I am doing major PhotoShop work, being able to quit finder might help out loads.

Will try tonight and let you know how much of a difference it make.

—

----------------------
http://mijlee.com
----------------------

iloveitaly's picture
2 pencils

You could use my application App Stop to stop the application to prevent it from using CPU time. It doesn't free up memory, but it does free up other system resources.

Creativebits is a blog about creativity, design and Macs. We also have a critique section where you can post your work to get opinions and a forum to discuss any design related topics.

Recommend us on Google

Latest critique

Do you need a great new logo?

If you need a logo for your company or product you can get it done with us.
In our logo store you can pick from over 28,000 pre-made logos that will be customized to your name for free or you can post a contest for us for just $250 and our designers from all over the world will submit dozens of logo design suggestions to your specific needs.

Marketplace