What is RAM????
This is a very simple question, yet many of us can’t answer it! All we know is RAM comes in 1GB, 2GB, 3GB etc and our smartphones have it. You may have studied about RAM and ROM in school days, and forgot it right after you passed your exams. In this post, we will learn
- What is RAM?
- What are the functions of RAM ?
- How is RAM memory used?
- How much RAM should your computer have?
Whenever you go to buy a new desktop or laptop, the sales guy will tell you:
Sir this laptop has :
an i3 processor , 1/2/3/4GB DDR3 RAM and 250/500gb Hard-disk.
We all have heard this at some point of out life. Even when you buy a new laptop and tell your friends about it, they ask you the specifications, you just blindly repeat, whatever the sales guy told you. Let us take an overview of RAM.
Overview :
RANDOM ACCESS MEMORY or RAM as we call it, is the place from where your Microprocessor (MP) executes its data/programs/video/music or photos. MP processes any application or program in the RAM. If there was no RAM, the MP would have to go to the physical location of that application, every time to fetch the next few bits. But since we have RAM in our CPU, when we execute any program, it loads itself into the RAM. Say, I double-click on a song, The following process will take place :
- The microprocessor will then open the Application.
- The song would be copied into the RAM.
- The application will play that song from RAM.
So now the song is in RAM hence MP does not need to go to the physical place of that song each time to get the next few bits. It simply takes it from the RAM and continues playing. Now let’s assume I want to open Chrome, to check my emails. At present my RAM only has a song and an application playing it. The browser will take some of the remaining space available in RAM. RAM will now have of :
- Current song.
- Application to play the song.
- Chrome.
So while checking emails if I switch back to VLC , the VLC application from the RAM would be selected, and brought on the screen. If there are four application running at once, you can switch between four of them easily, because all of them would be in present in the RAM memory. This is how multitasking takes place with the help of RAM.
The Real Situation!
We know, no one actually opens just two applications at a time. We have the Operating System running, the browser with lots of tabs opened in it, we have a song playing while torrenting alongside softwares, windows explorer and numerous other background processes open in the background.
So what happens when there is no space left in your RAM to accommodate more programs?
It just removes that application which wasn’t used since a long time.
So if you open a Word document, PowerPoint presentation, play a song, open 2 browsers with many websites opened in it, The application you’re using frequently stays in the RAM, because the user needs it. Suppose you haven’t opened your presentation from a long time, so OS removes it from RAM.
When you try to get back to the PowerPoint after a long time, it will take a time to load it back into memory. Why? Because it wasn’t present in RAM so the Microprocessor had to fetch it again. This is where 2/3/4GB RAM comes handy. In simple words, More RAM = More applications to multitask smoothly.
How Much GBs of RAM should you have?
Well if you are just a normal user, use your laptop or desktop just to surf internet of watch movies, listen to songs 1-2gb is enough for you. 2GB of RAM and your laptop run smoothly. If you’re a moderate user, opening lots of application simultaneously or working on a virtual machine. 3GB RAM would handle this.
I have 3GB RAM and my machine lags when I have a browser open and 2 Virtual Machines running. And if you’re the geeky type of user, the opening may tab in many windows of the browser, have few virtual machines in standby mode, music playing a background, BitTorrent downloading few files and you have servers installed in your laptop, well then only 8GB RAM will satisfy you.
To know more about RAM’s check our post on RAM in detail.