Do I Have Enough RAM in my PC?

What is RAM?

RAM (Ran­dom Access Mem­ory) are phys­i­cal mod­ules that you have to open up your com­puter to install. RAM allows you to run more soft­ware pro­grams at the same time. RAM can make pro­grams run faster (i.e. 3D games, video edit­ing, web surf­ing, lis­ten­ing to music, etc).

Why do I need more RAM?

Your Oper­at­ing Sys­tem (i.e. Win­dows XP, Win­dows Vista, Mac OS 10) needs a cer­tain amount of RAM to run smoothly. After the OS has taken it’s cut of the RAM, your other pro­grams fight for the rest (usu­ally first come first serve). If you have a small amount of RAM, all of your extra soft­ware (Anti-Virus, Microsoft Office, Inter­net Explorer, etc) will not run smoothly, period.

After your com­puter has used as much phys­i­cal RAM is it pos­si­bly can, it begins to make your hard drive act like RAM. Hard dri­ves are embar­rass­ing slow alter­na­tives to RAM. When the Hard Drive is play­ing the role of RAM. you can usu­ally hear a low grind­ing or etch­ing sound com­ing from the com­puter, when­ever you are attempt­ing to do some­thing. More RAM will keep your hard drive from doing dou­ble duty and pre­serve the live of your hard drive.

How much RAM do I need?

• Win­dows XP really needs 2GB –3GB to run smoothly.
• Win­dows Vista needs at least 3GB to boot up right, but it does not really get respon­sive until about 6GB.
• Win­dows 7 is com­pa­ra­ble to Win­dows Vista, although I must say the smoothest com­puter expe­ri­ence I ever had in my life was with 12GB.
• Mac OS X needs 3GB or more to run smoothly.

Where can I pur­chase more RAM?

I rec­om­mend Crucial.com, because their RAM is reli­able and does not cause crashes like some of the other RAM I have used in the past.

I also like that their web­site can tell you how much RAM your com­puter has, how much it can hold, what type of RAM you need, and it gives you the option to buy and comes with free shipping.

Con­clu­sion

Upgrad­ing your RAM has an imme­di­ate impact. Every­thing runs faster and smoother afterwards.

Unfor­tu­nately com­puter man­u­fac­tur­ers do not put a pre­mium on RAM, so com­put­ers you buy off of the shelf usu­ally does not include an ade­quate amount of RAM. When cus­tomers are given the option to build their own com­puter, man­u­fac­tur­ers do not place empha­sis on the impor­tance of RAM. As a result, most cus­tomers never increase the amount, because all they see is the hefty price of the upgrade.

I rec­om­mend buy­ing the addi­tional RAM after you buy the com­puter, because buy­ing RAM from Cru­cial or a com­peti­tor costs a lot less that what Apple or Dell will charge, and installing RAM is super-duper easy.

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