When I was a kid our family computer started complaining about 'insufficient memory' with newer programs. In an attempt to remedy the problem, we deleted as much unused stuff as we could from the hard drive, but it never seemed to help. We had committed one of the most common computing errors: confusing RAM with hard drive space. Bits and bytes The confusion is so common, I think, because the two share the same basic terminology: bits, bytes, kilobytes, megabytes, and gigabytes. So let's get those out of the way first.

A bit is the smallest unit of information, like a light that can be described only as 'on' or 'off.' The numeral 1 usually means 'on' and 0 means 'off.' All information on a computer can be expressed as a string of bits, for example the letter 'Z' can be encoded as 01011010.

Eight bits--the number of bits a single character (that is, a letter, numeral, or symbol) is usually represented by--is called a byte. Since we often deal with information that is many, many bytes in size--music or movie files, for example--we use shorthand prefixes like kilo-, mega-, and giga-, for thousands, millions, and billions of bytes, respectively. A kilobyte (kB) is 1,024 bytes (2 10, for technical reasons), a megabyte (MB) is 1,048,576 (10 20), and so on, all the way up to terabytes, petabytes, and beyond. I won't go into any more technical detail, but if it interests you,. Both your computer's hard drive and its memory store information, and the capacity of both is measured in bits, bytes, kilobytes, and so on, but the two store different kinds of information in different ways, which I describe in the next sections. RAM: Random Access Memory 'RAM' is short for Random Access Memory, and it's commonly referred to as just 'memory.'

Random Access means that the computer can access any data stored in it very quickly--in just a few nanoseconds, i.e. Billionths of a second--without concerning itself with any of the data before or after. In desktop computers, RAM takes the form of long, narrow modules, sometimes called 'sticks' of RAM, which have a connector with a hundred or more tiny metal contacts running the length of the long side that plugs into the motherboard. RAM for laptop computers is basically the same, but considerably smaller (and consequently more expensive). Most new computers are sold with 1 or 2 gigabytes (GB) of RAM. Older ones may have 256 or 512MB, and top-of-the-lines might have 2.5GB, 3GB, or more. RAM's purpose in a computer is temporary storage for information that the computer is using right now.

If you're listening to music, parts of the song file will be present in RAM, as well as the software that's being used to play it. If you're reading an email, the text of the email is in RAM, and likewise the software needed to read it. All programs, including Windows itself, your web browser, video players, instant messaging programs, and so on, use memory while they're running (even if they're not visible on the screen and minimized or hidden). Unfortunately your computer's memory is finite. If a program complains of 'insufficient memory,' and often if your computer seems to be running slowly, it's because the computer needs to store things in RAM that it does not have enough room for. Build Your Own Home Darkroom Pdf File.

The computer can compensate, to a degree, by using 'virtual memory'--which I'll discuss a bit later--but generally speaking the more RAM you have, the more and bigger programs you'll be able to run simultaneously without experiencing slowdowns and 'out of memory' errors. One thing worth reiterating is that memory is temporary storage. By its very nature, as soon as you turn off the computer, everything in memory is instantly gone.

Bang & Olufsen Beo. Description: Lust for life - love of music. Play H6 is crafted in luxurious materials, and makes a bold statement in terms of design. Difference between Sequential and Random Access operations. What is the difference between Sequential and Random. If you find disk access is predominantly random.

Without electricity running through them, RAM modules are blank slates and inert as rocks. That's just fine, though. For storing information we want to keep around, we have hard drives. The hard drive The proper term here, technical types will tell you, is hard disk drive.

An apt metaphor is a record player: The disk refers to one or more circular platters that are like vinyl records but permanently mounted on a spindle. Instead of vinyl, however, they're made out of metal or glass and are coated with a magnetic material.

The rest of the device is the drive, which is like the record player itself: It has a motor that turns the disks on the spindle and read-write heads for each platter, which are like the record player's needle, except that they use magnetism to both access--'read'--and modify--'write'--data stored on the disk. The drive also contains electronics that control these parts and let it talk to the rest of the computer.