by JLN

Created on: March 31, 2009   Last Updated: July 13, 2009

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RAM, like most terms connected to computer hardware, is an acronym, in this case it stands for Randon Access Memory. Quite why those in the industry feel the need to turn everything vaguely related to computers into acronym's or abbreviations has always alluded me. I suspect it is so sales people can confuse the crap out of unwary consumers by saying things like "it comes with a RAID array, 1GIG of DDR RAM, a 1066MHZ FSB, support for SSE3 and is pre-installed with XP SP2". This leaves the unwitting customer in a kind of semi-trance like state, rendering them easily suggestible and thus more likely to walk out of the shop with a computer costing more than the GDP of a small county. The different types of RAM on the market are a perfect example this fasination with block capitals, inflated numbers, and meaningless naming schema's. So let me attempt to break RAM down into a more succinct and easily understandable form.

What is RAM?

Firstly we need to understand what RAM is, and why it is so named. My favourite analogy for RAM, and one that has no doubt been encountered by anyone who has dabbled in the world of computer hardware, is to think of a computer as being a small office. In this office there is a clerk who represents the CPU (Central Processing Unit) of the computer. The CPU is the bit that does all the actual work. In the far corner of the office sits a large set of filing cabinets which represent the computers hard disk drive(s), these cabinets store ALL the information in the computer, it's word documents, films, music, pictures, you name it they got it.

Now RAM is like the clerk's desk, anything that the clerk is working on at any particular moment in time is kept on the desk. Let's just imagine that this is a very lazy desk clerk, so lazy in fact that he (or she) has decided to employ a runner to grab anything that is needed from the filing cabinets. When you open say, a word document, this is the equivalent of the clerk asking the runner to go fetch something from the filing cabinets. It must first be found by the runner, which can itself take a very long time in such large cabinets, it then has to be taken back to the desk so the clerk can edit it. Depending on the size of the file being opened the process of fetching this file can be either very quick or very time consuming (a big heavy pile of documents might require a serveral of trips, while

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