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>8. What Memory (RAM) Is For The best analogy I can find for RAM is short-term memory. RAM holds less stuff than long-term memory (hard disk), but is faster to
by zck 17y ago
>8. What Memory (RAM) Is For
The best analogy I can find for RAM is short-term memory. RAM holds less stuff than long-term memory (hard disk), but is faster to access. And if you don't put an item into long-term memory (write to disk), you forget it (when the power is turned off). People seem to understand that.
- rufo 17y agoI tend to liken RAM to a table, programs/data to books, and the hard drive to a bookshelf. You can't read stuff on a bookshelf; you have to take it out and put it on the table to open it. (Sure, you can read a book on a couch, but this is the computer we're talking about - it has certain rules.) You can take out as many books from the bookshelf as you like, as long as they fit on the open table. If you run out of table space, you need to make more space on the table, and the only way to do that is to put books back on the shelf. If you're trying to open too many books at once with too little table space, the only thing you can do is constantly go back and forth between the bookshelf and the table, open the book, find your place, etc., read a word, take it back, open the previous book, write it down, etc., and it's going to take you way longer to do the same work.
- Periodic 17y agoThat's a great analogy. I like it. I've been using the short-term memory analogy, but this fits a lot better. I know that we don't entirely understand our brain, but everyone understands books and a table. Too bad memory is divided into "pages" and not "books".
- jimbokun 17y agoOr, equivalently, the table/bookshelf is a great analogy for short and long term memory. :)
- theBobMcCormick 17y agoI use that analogy also. It really helps users to understand how memory and hard drive space are two different things. I can't tell you how many times I've had users tell me that they got some variety of out of memory error, then immediately start describing how they tried to delete stuff from their hard drive to fix it. :-)
- PebblesRox 17y agoAnd if you need to, you can decide to buy a bigger table!
- chops 17y agoA good one indeed. I use a similar one: RAM is your desktop (literal desktop, as in the "top of your desk"). The more desk space you have, the more "things" you can be working on at the same time. Disk Space is the file cabinet. Shutting down is like cleaning your desk, whatever doesn't get put back into the file cabinet gets thrown away.
- drusenko 17y agoWas just about to post this same comment. RAM is like telling someone to remember a 7 digit number -- they could probably repeat it to you right away, but remembering it in an hour, or a day, is a lot harder.
- mdg 17y agoRelated to #8 but not directly to what you said: > Making the problem worse is that fact that most consumer PCs are sold with the bare minimum of RAM. Is this true still? I thought it was clever marketing to sell your laptop with 4 gigs and a 32 bit OS. Not only can the OS not address all that RAM, but it wont use all of it. To the uninformed consumer, which this article is about, they think 'Wow! 4 gigs?! This other one only has (n, where n < 4) gigs, so this 4 gig computer must be a better deal!"
- hernan7 17y agoGood analogy. A computer with not enough RAM would be like Dory from Finding Nemo.