by Jason Garland

Created on: December 17, 2008

Waiting for a video or song to buffer on the Internet is probably as common these days as sitting in traffic waiting for a stoplight to change. In many ways the two activities are similar. They both serve to direct the flow off traffic and both are irritating because we have to wait around for our turn.

Buffering on computers, however, happens much more often than just when playing videos and music. CPUs, printers, video cards, CD-ROMs and even hard drives make use of buffering so that they can provide a steady, uninterrupted stream of information to the various computer components requesting it, the result of which is the seamless operation of your computer. The key element in this stream of information is the cache for each component, and that cache comes in a lot of forms.

When we talk about computer cache, we're generally referring to a memory chip, usually RAM, dedicated to a specific device. Video cards are a good example, as they are often labeled according to how much cache they have on board. If you've ever checked out listings for video cards online, you'll have noticed listings like "NVIDIA Quadro FX 1700 Graphics adapter - 512 MB - DDR2 SDRAM". This listing lets us know that we're getting a card with 512 MB of DDR2 SDRAM cache on board. High quality video can be quite a memory hog, so having a large cache on board allows video heavy applications like games and design software to run smoothly while minimizing chop.This RAM is soldered directly onto the video card and serves only video functions.

Some devices have expandable caches. Printers are often built this way. If you've ever tried to print a large PDF file to your printer only to be frustrated by a long wait, then you probably need some more RAM in your printer. Not all printers have the capability of expanding the cache, but larger nicer models often have a bay that can be popped open revealing an extra slot or two for a stick of RAM.

Not all caches are hard RAM, though. Sometimes cache can be a file on your hard drive. If you're using Microsoft Windows then you have a cache file on your primary partition called the paging file. This paging file acts as virtual memory, which is a way of saying that when your system's RAM is full and it needs to store data temporarily, it spills over into your paging file. The paging file actually expands and contracts according to how much space RAM needs to keep up with the demands you're putting on your computer. Unless you've got a whole lot of RAM in your

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