Hard Drive Access

Today’s computers come with large hard drives; storage capacities range from 500MB to more than 40 GB. They tend to work similar to a filling cabinet; just as you don’t climb inside a filling cabinet to work, your computer can’t really work inside your hard drive. When you tell the computer to launch an application or open a document, it retrieves information from hard drive storage and places a copy of it (or a copy of just the portions it needs) into RAM. As a result, the more memory you have, the more applications and files you can work with at one time.

When several programs are open simultaneously, the operating system must swap between them, which means the hard drive has to be accessed frequently. RAM allows programs to be accessed from memory rather than the hard drive. Because memory access is faster than drive access, swap time decreases and performance improves when plenty of RAM is available.

There is no doubt that performance suffers on memory challenged system: Actions execute slowly, and pop-up messages advice that you can’s run a program, create a large file, or print one document while working in another. These error alerts are “out of memory” messages. Your computer is telling you it doesn’t have enough RAM to do what you want. It is not a question of storage; you can have lots of hard drive space and still be short on memory. If you frequently run out of memory while working, it may be time to buy and install some more.