If you've ever bought a laptop and seen a spec say "4GB RAM" or "8GB RAM," you might have wondered, "What is RAM?" Why do I need it? How much do I need? Today you will learn everything you need to know about the basics of RAM.
ContentsWhat is RAM? Is RAM the same as memory? Why is RAM important? Why getting more RAM makes my system faster? How much RAM do you need?RAM, or Random Access Memory, is the place in your computer for temporary storage of your files and applications. The need for RAM arises because the speed of the hard drive cannot keep up with the speed of the processor. RAM has a much higher frequency than a hard drive, which makes it ideal for storing temporary files so that the processor can process them faster without having to wait for a slow hard drive.
When you click an icon on your computer, such as your browser, your computer finds that program on your hard drive and loads it into RAM for you to use.
One thing to note is that the file on RAM is volatile, which means it is not permanent. Once you turn off the computer, all RAM data is lost. If you've worked on something before and your laptop died before you could save it, you've lost your data because you were working on that document in RAM and it hasn't yet been saved to your hard drive.
Remember that RAM stands for Random Access Memory. In short, the terms RAM and memory refer to the same thing.
RAM is essential for the speed and usability of a system. Especially when we had much slower hard drives, it would have taken an unbearable amount of time to do anything. It is a very fast staging area, temporary storage for the processes your computer is working on.
For a large majority of applications, the use of your hard disk is essential to a good experience. For example, if you think about your web browser, be it Chrome, Firefox, or Safari, you have tracking cookies and stored passwords. If your browser had to crawl through your hard drive for absolutely every tracking cookie and password, it would be incredibly slow.
As mentioned earlier, RAM is the buffer of the hard drive, as it stores temporary files to be processed by the CPU. If you only have a small amount of RAM, once it's full, the computer starts sprinkling its contents onto the hard drive (in a special location called a swap file/virtual memory/swap), which is much slower hardware. . Once the virtual memory fills up, your computer slows down at a frantic pace. Your mouse may not even move or your clicks may not receive any response.
When you increase the amount of RAM in your system, you increase your hard drive's buffer so that your content isn't spilled onto virtual memory.
This is a question that depends on what you are using this computer for. For the majority of people, I'd say around 8GB of RAM is enough; most modern machines come with that many anyway. If you're hoping to play video games, you might want to push up to 16GB of RAM. For more memory-intensive applications, like running virtual machines or compiling large codebases, I would recommend more than 32-64 GB of RAM. .
Now that you have learned what RAM is in a laptop and the basics of RAM, be sure to check out more RAM related articles and learn more about RAM timing, how to check the health of RAM in Windows 10 and how to free up RAM in Windows 10.
