Speaker 1: Stuff happens, just don't let it happen to your photos, music,
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Speaker 1: dot com. That's m o z Y dot com. Welcome
Speaker 1: to brain Stuff from how Stuff works dot com where
Speaker 1: smart happens him Marshall Brain with today's question, does adding
Speaker 1: RAM to your computer make it faster? Up to a point,
Speaker 1: adding RAM or random access memory will cause your computer
Speaker 1: to feel faster, sometimes a lot faster. RAM is important
Speaker 1: because of an operating system component called the virtual memory manager,
Speaker 1: or the VMM. Here's how it works. When you run
Speaker 1: a program like a word processor or an Internet browser
Speaker 1: on your computer, the microprocessor in your computer pulls a
Speaker 1: file off the hard disk and loads it into RAM.
Speaker 1: In the case of a big program like Microsoft word
Speaker 1: this file is huge and it needs a lot of RAM.
Speaker 1: Then the microprocessor loads in any data files that you
Speaker 1: want to look at as well. So a big application
Speaker 1: could easily take a hundred megabytes of RAM or more,
Speaker 1: and most people normally open several programs at once. Plus
Speaker 1: the operating system itself needs RAM two everything together may
Speaker 1: need more RAM than your machine has. Where does all
Speaker 1: the extra RAM space come from. The extra space is
Speaker 1: created by the virtual Memory manager. The VMM looks at
Speaker 1: the RAM you're using and find sections of it that
Speaker 1: are not currently being used. It puts these sections of
Speaker 1: RAM in a place called the swap file on the
Speaker 1: hard disk. For example, even though I have my email
Speaker 1: program open right now, I haven't looked at email for
Speaker 1: an hour, so the whole thing maybe sitting in a
Speaker 1: swap file on the hard disc. That's called swapping out
Speaker 1: the program. The next time I click on the email program,
Speaker 1: the VMM will swap in all of its bites from
Speaker 1: the hard disk and probably swaps something else out in
Speaker 1: the process. Because the hard disk is slow, the act
Speaker 1: of swapping things in and out causes a noticeable delay,
Speaker 1: sometimes several seconds. If you have a very small amount
Speaker 1: of RAM in your computer, then the VMM is always
Speaker 1: swapping things in and out to get anything done. In
Speaker 1: that case, your computer feels like it's crawling. As you
Speaker 1: add more RAM, you get to a point where you
Speaker 1: only notice the swapping when you need to load a
Speaker 1: new program or change Windows. If you were to put
Speaker 1: four gigabytes of RAM and your computer you would never
Speaker 1: see the VMM swapping anything. That's about as fast as
Speaker 1: things can get. If you then added more RAM, it
Speaker 1: wouldn't have any effect. Some applications like Photoshop or a
Speaker 1: film editing package need tons of RAM to do their job.
Speaker 1: If you run them on a machine with two little RAM,
Speaker 1: they swapped constantly and run very slowly. You can get
Speaker 1: a huge speed boost by adding enough RAM to eliminate
Speaker 1: the swapping. Programs like these may run ten to fifty
Speaker 1: times faster once they have enough rams. Do you have
Speaker 1: any ideas or suggestions for this podcast? If so, please
Speaker 1: send me an email at podcast at how stuff works
Speaker 1: dot com. For more on this and thousands of other topics,
Speaker 1: go to how stuff works dot com. Your photos, music
Speaker 1: and documents are irreplaceable. Protect them with Mosey by e
Speaker 1: m C, the most trusted name and cloud backup. Back
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