Computer Memory and Speed: An Analogy

The amount of RAM in your PC can have a great effect on your PC’s performance. As someone who works with computers on a daily basis and who derives his income primarily from the installation, repair and support of them, I am constantly asked why is my computer running so slowly?

Slow running computers can be a symptom of many different problems. In this article I will tackle the issue of memory or the lack of it in many systems that people have in their homes or offices.

One of my favorite a analogies references making a meal at your house. In this analogy I use your countertop as the cache RAM on your CPU or processor, your pantry as your RAM memory, and the grocery store serves as your hard drive. Imagine that you’re making stew for friends and the ingredients you need are meat, potatoes carrots and celery onions spices and salt and pepper. The countertop is fairly small and can only hold two of your ingredients at any one time. Everything on your countertop is easily accessible and you can get rapidly. The other items that you need are in your pantry and they take a more time to get. When it comes time to get the potatoes however you find that you don’t have any in your cupboard. This entails a trip to the grocery store. How much longer does it take to go to the grocery store to get your potatoes rather than reaching into the cupboard. To compare this to a PC when your processor goes to access data from RAM and does not find it there it has to go to the hard drive which ends up being about a thousand times slower than accessing anything located in RAM.

As you can see if your system does not have enough RAM it’s always having to go to the grocery store to get potatoes. This takes a severe penalty on the speed of your system. By increasing the size of your RAM you can store more potatoes and run less to the store. Or in computer terms the more information you can store in RAM the less your computer will need to access the hard drive thereby speeding up your computer.

To wrap this up many issues of machine performance short of buying a new PC can be corrected by simply installing more RAM in your machine.