Everybody wants a high-end computer with monstrous speed, which enables you to open up to several applications at the same time, without even lagging for a single second. So what are some of the ways to increase your computer speed? One of the most common questions is that, does adding more RAM to your computer makes it faster?
Up to some point, adding RAM (Random Access Memory) does make your computer feel faster. RAM is important because of an operating system component called VMM (Virtual Memory Manager). When you run applications in your computer, those applications that you run will take up a lot of space, depending on the size your application. Some application may take up 2MB of memory, while the others may take up as much as 30 MB of memory to run. Beside all these applications, the operating system itself is taking up quite a bit of space.
Therefore, your computer needs to have extra space which will be created by the VMM. The VMM looks at RAM and finds sections of RAM that are not currently in use. It puts these sections of RAM in a place called the swap file on the hard disk. If I have a Words document opened up, and does not use it for let say about 30 minutes, the VMM will move all the bytes making up the Words document, out to the hard disk. This is called swapping out.
The next time I click on the Words document, VMM will then swap in all of its byte from the hard disk back to the document itself. This swapping in and out process may cause delays as the hard disk is slow relative to RAM.
If you have a very small amount of RAM (say, 16 megabytes), then the VMM is always swapping things in and out to get anything done. In that case, your computer feels like it is crawling.
If you were to put 512 MB of RAM in your computer, the VMM would have plenty of room and you would never see it swapping anything.
Some applications (things like Photoshop, many compilers, and animation packages) need tons of RAM to do their job. If you run them on a machine with too little RAM, they swap constantly and run very slowly.
RAM is just like a pair of running shoes to a computer. Let your computer wear the right size of the shoe and you can definitely see a drastic change of speed performance from them.
Keeno Gregory is a computer technician who is in the computer industry for the past 5 years, and used to write articles about computer and Internet performance.
Do check out a site that he strongly recommends, which provides insights on how to double the speed of your computer and internet connection, even without any technical knowledge.
Do visit http://www.homebizgears.com/doublePCspeed.html for more information.
Please feel free to republish this article on your website, or distribute it to your friends or clients, as long as you leave the resource box intact.
Keeno Gregory
Source: www.articlecity.com
