im just wondering what does it mean when the computer RAM runs out it uses the computer hard drive?

Question

When Microsoft Windows runs out of RAM to use for programs, it uses the hard drive as temporary storage for program information. Because this temporary storage is not "real" memory, it is referred to as virtual memory. While virtual memory keeps the system from crashing, using virtual memory slows the system down, even if you have a fast processor and powerful hard drive. could some body please explain that. how and why does it happen?

Answer 1

Writing and reading form the drive takes more time.

http://computer.howstuffworks.com/virtual-memory.htm

Answer 2

Think of it as roads with traffic that get congested as you get into the city. No matter how fast a machine can be, it is only as fast as its slowest part/bottleneck. Virtual cache only help facilitate windows work. If your running out of memory by that much, you'll probably want to add memory to the machine. The problem is that hard drives still have to have the information written to and from the drive as the cache is flushed and new information is added. This process is many times slower than an actual process which is performed directly in memory itself. Not very slow in terms of how long it takes a human to calculate an answer to a query but forever when you talking mili or micro seconds in lieu of seconds itself. This process is also multiplied because many simultaneous processes are happening for whatever program your running, along with everything else you don't notice is running as well. IM, your virus scanner, background updates, and any other program your running that might be minmized but still take up some part of the computer resources. You can certainly increase the size of the virtual memory but there is a point at which there is little to no benefit to having a greater size. The motherboard itself is part of your bottleneck process and will hinder your speed even if you have the best processor and drive on the market. It alone is the path that all this data must travel to go from point A to point B. For each part there is a bottleneck where that device is trying to interact with every other part. Each part must perform equally well to have flawless performance and unfortunately most of us have a limit on how much money we can spend on a system. Also there are limits on the architecture itself and no matter how much money you can spend there will be bottlenecks until the technology itself can progress into new levels.

Answer 3

Actually, no... It's not about using up all internal storage, before gulping on the HDD... Memory swapping (which is different from the virtual memory technique) occurs when multiple processes are executed simultaneously. It consists of temporarily storing on a secondary storage device -- a HDD -- the data from a portion (a page) of the primary storage system -- the precious internal RAM. This technique was invented at a time when RAM circuits were pretty expensive and difficult to use in large capacities (all bus logic included). Furthermore, the continous growth in computing power demanded platforms able to run as many parallel processes/task as possible on rather limited hardware resources. At that moment, concepts as protected mode operation, virtual memory addressing, task switching and memory swapping were introduced for the first time.
Such techniques remained until today for the simple reason that they are far more cheaper and with the accumulated knowledge of decades of usage, rather easy to implement.

Answer 4

The operating system configures RAM as pages. A page is just a fixed chunk of size of memory. The pages might be 4KB in size.

When the OS runs out of RAM space, it will copy some pages that are not currently in-use to a temporary location on the hard-disk. It does this to make space for other pages it wants to fill.

Later, when it needs these stored pages, it will copy back these pages into RAM and save other pages into the temporary location on the harddisk.

The temporary location on the hard-disk is called the swap space. It's where the operating system is swapping pages in and out of RAM. Microsoft naming convention makes this swap space part of the virtual memory system.

Virtual memory is a separate but related idea. Virtual memory allows programs to be written to use more RAM memory then physically exists on the computer. That is possible through the use of the paging mechanism and swap space that I described.

Answer 5

Harddisk storage is much cheaper than RAM (random access memory) and Windows is designed to move least used code from RAM to the swapfile on the harddisk to free up RAM for the code that is being used. Even if you have 1 or 2GB of RAM, the system will still want to store unused code to the swapfile on the harddisk.
If your system is short on RAM, it will run quite a bit slower, as the system is busy swapping code in and out from the harddisk to perform the various functions of the OS and any programs that are loaded.
To minimise this problem one should have at least 512MB for Windows XP.

Answer 6

You have to think of it this way.
The processor and ram work together.

Not having enough ram and a large processor is like having a three legged race with a one leg man.

People believe the processor is the most important component, but the truth is the ram is just as important, if not more important.

In a sense RAM is more readily available than virtual memory.

Answer 7

The RAM is similar to keeping track of things in your head. When you run out of RAM, the computer starts to write things down onto the hard drive temporarily much like you might jot details down on paper when given to much information at once.

Answer 8

Because your computer would crash if you had no memory so it uses your drive on a tempory file this is called pagefile.sys in XP and stored in your C drive in the root directory but no matter how fast your drive it can not be faster than the real thing

Answer 9

Download and then run startup.exe at:

http://www.mlin.net/startupcpl.shtml......

Can't live without it and windows...

Then disable and/or uninstall whatever u don't need.

Joe...