Quitting the Finder?

bobbo

bobbo

Panther User
I'm sorry that I am again posting in the FAQ thread, I read a message saying I shouldnt post questions here AFTER i posted this . . . and can only find out how to edit not delete.

On my friend's iBook, an option appears in the Finder menu to "Quit Finder", therefore freeing up more RAM for apps like Final Cut Express, iMovie, etc. However on my imac (old style G3) this option is not there. What is happening?
 
He probably used some type of 3rd party utility program like TinkerTool to add the quit option to the finder menu.

I really don't know if this would help a person or not. If you aren't doing any activities in the finder, it takes 0% of your processor, and very little ram, with some of it probably being paged out to virtual memory as it sits idle.

Are you running into problems that you think this may solve?
 
Are you sure it says Quit Finder and not Force Quit?

A better solution would be to install more RAM. I would not recommend quitting the finder while working.
 
With tinkertool, you can add finder quit to the finder menu. I really don't see much use for it, besides maybe restarting your finder, but it is there.
 
Quitting the finder wouldn't really free up much more memory anyway - if you're using a lot of memory in one app, other apps will have their virtual memory pages swapped out to disk, and most of the physical memory will go to the app that needs it.

If the Finder is eating up a lot of CPU time I can see that being useful though. That said, I've never seen an idle Finder use any CPU...
 
If you edit ~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.Finder.plist there is an option there called something like "showQuitOptionInFinder" or some-such. Can't tell you exactly now as I'm not at my Mac. If you have Developer tools installed this will open in PLIST editor, otherwise just open in a text editor. Hope this helps you out.
 
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