~written by David Sheerr, Dataram Memory Blog Team Member
It’s no secret that upgrading your computer’s memory most often improves performance, but have you ever stopped to wonder why that is? Before you can understand why a RAM upgrade improves your computer’s performance, you have to understand the role memory plays in your computer.
Imagine for a moment that you’re sitting at a small desk in an office somewhere… unless you’re actually sitting at a small desk in an office right now – if that’s the case imagine yourself sitting at a small desk on a tropical island. You deserve it. Now imagine that a man walks up to you and hands you a pile of unsorted papers. Each paper is colored red, blue, green or yellow, and the man demands that you sort the papers by color.
You try to do as he says, but your small desk will only accommodate one pile of paper at a time. In order to complete the task you have to sort one color at a time, hand it off to the man, and then start on the next color.
If you had a larger desk, you could sort all four colors at once, thus cutting the total time the task took in half.
Think of your computer’s RAM as its desk. With more RAM, your computer will have a larger “work area”, allowing it to perform more operations simultaneously.
To put it a bit more technically, each time you start an application to work with a file, your computer has to load the application program as well as the data file to be edited into RAM. The more memory the computer has, the more work it can do at one time, which results in increased speed and performance.
So, why should you upgrade your computer’s memory? To give it a bigger workspace, and allow it to run faster. So go ahead, get your computer a bigger “desk” – it’ll thank you for it, and you’ll thank yourself for making your computer experience a whole lot better.
