What is memory?

When our customers talk to us about memory there is often confusion over what it is.  Alot of people tend to think it's the overall storage capacity of their computer i.e. their hard disks.  Strictly speaking, when we talk about memory we're talking about the computer chips in your PC.  These chips are where your PC's processor stores data that it's currently working with.  Memory is volatile and all data will be lost from it when it loses power - hence the need to save your data onto hard disk or other more permanent media.  (This doesn't include flash memory and solid state drives which are special types of memory chip used for more permanent storage)

However, your hard disk can be used to increase your computer's working memory (virtual memory) and so if you're running out of disk space, you can often run out of memory at the same time.

How can you tell if you're short of memory?

If your computer is low on memory you'll probably notice it takes forever to do anything.  It seems particularly slow when starting up and switching between programs.  The hard disk light will appear to be on all the time as well.

Your PC needs to move files and programs from the hard disk to its memory in order to work with them.  When the memory is low it has to keep swapping the data it's working on in and out of memory to and from the hard disk. 

If you find that your PC is behaving this way consistently, then it's probably time to spend a bit of money upgrading your memory.  You can check how much memory you're using by pressing Ctrl-Alt-Del to access the Task Manager and then click on the Performance tab.

A simple analogy

Consider yourself sitting in a room at a desk.  On the desk you have some files and there's a filing cabinet in the corner of the room.

You place the file that you are working on directly in front of you because it's quicker to read from and write to the file when it's positioned there.  If you need to work on a different file you move the current file away from you and bring the new file in front of you.

However, there is only so many files you can fit on your desk, so eventually you will need to get up from your desk and walk to the filing cabinet in the corner of the room to retrieve additional files.  If your desk is already full, you will need to remove one of the files from your desk.  If you haven't quite finished working with it, you might leave it open on top of the filing cabinet for quick access later.  You then grab the new file and walk back to your desk to continue your work.

In this scenario, you are the Central Processing Unit (CPU or processor), the position directly in front of you is the cache memory, the rest of the desk is the standard memory and the filing cabinet is the hard disk.  That half finished file on top of the filing cabinet is your virtual memory.

You can see that you can access files on the desk quite quickly, but if the desk is too small you spend all your time getting out of your seat and walking over to the filing cabinet and back.  You can save some time by leaving some of the files open on top of the filing cabinet - avoids having to trawl through the filing cabinet again to find them.

So the simplest and most effective way of increasing your efficiency is by getting a bigger desk (more memory).  If you need more overall storage, then you need another filing cabinet (hard disk).