Stuff happens, just don't let it happen to your photos, music, and documents. Protect your important files with Mosey by e m C, the most trusted name and cloud backup. Save ten percent today with promo code brain Stuff at Mosey dot com. That's m o z Y dot com. Welcome to brain Stuff from how Stuff works dot com where smart happens him Marshall Brain with today's question, does adding RAM to your computer make it faster? Up to a point, adding RAM or random access memory will cause your computer
to feel faster, sometimes a lot faster. RAM is important because of an operating system component called the virtual memory manager, or the VMM. Here's how it works. When you run a program like a word processor or an Internet browser on your computer, the microprocessor in your computer pulls a file off the hard disk and loads it into RAM. In the case of a big program like Microsoft word this file is huge and it needs a lot of RAM. Then the microprocessor loads in any data files that you
want to look at as well. So a big application could easily take a hundred megabytes of RAM or more, and most people normally open several programs at once. Plus the operating system itself needs RAM two everything together may need more RAM than your machine has. Where does all the extra RAM space come from. The extra space is created by the virtual Memory manager. The VMM looks at the RAM you're using and find sections of it that
are not currently being used. It puts these sections of RAM in a place called the swap file on the hard disk. For example, even though I have my email program open right now, I haven't looked at email for an hour, so the whole thing maybe sitting in a swap file on the hard disc. That's called swapping out the program. The next time I click on the email program, the VMM will swap in all of its bites from the hard disk and probably swaps something else out in
the process. Because the hard disk is slow, the act of swapping things in and out causes a noticeable delay, sometimes several seconds. If you have a very small amount of RAM in your computer, then the VMM is always swapping things in and out to get anything done. In that case, your computer feels like it's crawling. As you add more RAM, you get to a point where you only notice the swapping when you need to load a
new program or change Windows. If you were to put four gigabytes of RAM and your computer you would never see the VMM swapping anything. That's about as fast as things can get. If you then added more RAM, it wouldn't have any effect. Some applications like Photoshop or a film editing package need tons of RAM to do their job. If you run them on a machine with two little RAM, they swapped constantly and run very slowly. You can get a huge speed boost by adding enough RAM to eliminate
the swapping. Programs like these may run ten to fifty times faster once they have enough rams. Do you have any ideas or suggestions for this podcast? If so, please send me an email at podcast at how stuff works dot com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, go to how stuff works dot com. Your photos, music and documents are irreplaceable. Protect them with Mosey by e m C, the most trusted name and cloud backup. Back up your files today and save ten percent with promo code.
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