What role does ram play in the everyday use of your computer?

Answer 1

As you would expect in such an answer: "It Depends!" On a computer system, if one has one weak area (or a "weak link in the chain") then improving that "weak link" will make a huge difference. For instance, one had a PC with an AMD 5000+ X2 processor with only 512 MB of RAM running windows Vista, then the computer performance would greatly be improved with another 1G or even 512MB of RAM. Most systems which you buy at the store are designed to have balanced "links" in the chains. So overall, memory can improve your speed, but may not necessarily.

Note also that different software demands different resources. Video editing uses a lot of memory, VISTA demands more memory than Windows 98.

Also some video cards rely on system memory rather than its own independent memory. If you are using an Intel GMA950, then it will take advantage of more memory.

If you already have a well balanced system with software that does not harness the memory then adding memory to your system will not help much. If your system is unbalanced in the RAM realm, then memory will make a large difference.

--Best, TOny

Answer 2

No. A PC uses RAM when it runs computer applications. Typically when you want to run an application it is read from disk into RAM then the computer starts to execute the instructions in the program.

If you have sufficient available RAM for the application everything is fine and the computer can typically run through the application with little difficulty and at high speed.

However, if you DON'T have enough RAM, or more likely if you have too many active applications everything changes.(you can have quite a few applications running in "background" and not know a thing about it unless you look at the task list.)

If there is insufficient RAM for the currently active applications, your computer will use "swap files" or "virtual memory" (whatever you want to call it) to temporarily hold the information about the application.

Swap files are fine, everything works well but it's quite a bit slower than loading the entire application into RAM. There is quite a bit of time lost when the computer has to constantly swap application data out to disk. That's why people are often told to add more RAM if their computers are running slow.

More RAM CAN make the computer run faster, especially if you have a lot of background applications.

Answer 3

RAM has a huge impact on computer performance. The size, type, speed, and bandwidth all have a positive, or negative effect on computer performance. For sake of argument though, and to keep it simple, the more RAM, the better. :)

Answer 4

Yes it dose effect the speed of the computer. It is one of 2 main functions that help speed your computer up, the number one is your proccessor. Its virtual memory, or Random Access Memory. Its where your PC stores memory to use it in any order instead of waiting to access a certain portion on your hard drive.

Answer 5

It doesn't affect the processor speed at all, however it does affect the overall speed of the computer 'cause you'd have more space to store processes (aka applications or programs executing).

Answer 6

RAM stands for Random Access Memory. RAM is kind of a temporary brain that is needed in order to run a computer efficiently without hangups with the CPU (central processing unit). It provides space for a computer to write and read any data that is then accessed by the CPU. RAM is considered volatile, which means that data stored there only stays until the computer is shut down. For what role it plays, pretty much everything. Video, Word documents, Music, Pictures, internet browser, etc. runs off this temporary brain. Its main purpose is to make the accessibility of programs a lot smoother without bogging down the CPU. When you add more RAM to a computer, you reduce the number of times your CPU needs to access a Hard Disk (aka, HD, Hard Drive). RAM makes this process more efficient because it works faster than a Hard Disk.

Answer 7

It doesn't.

However, if a machine that uses virtual memory is running a program (or multiple programs) that require a lot of memory (more than the amount of physical RAM), then some of the memory will be "paged out" ... that is, temporarily written to disk. There is an algorithm that the computer uses to determine which blocks of memory should be paged out, but when paged out memory needs to be accessed again, another block of physical memory must be paged out and the segment that the computer needs to access must be "paged in" (read from disk back into physical RAM). Usually this is a VERY slow process compared to accessing data that's already in physical RAM. So if a virtual memory computer is doing a lot of "paging", adding more RAM will speed it up, because it's not wasting all its time waiting on data going back and forth from RAM to disk.

Computers that don't use virtual memory don't have this problem... a program that needs more memory than is physically available at the time will just stop running. Usually "my computer is slow" is better than "my computer won't run this program", so operating systems that use virtual memory are pretty common. The exception is embedded devices, which generally need to work in "real time" and don't typically have high memory requirements anyway, so they'll be given sufficient physical memory for their expected operations and just soft fail if they run out.

Answer 8

yes