Quit Finder
Ivan | Tue, 2005-09-06 07:52
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.
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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.
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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.