Does having music stored in my computer really affect the memory/ or its speed?

Question

I have itunes and about 946 songs and I was wondering if it affects my computer and if I should buy those memory sticks to put my music there.

Answer 1

yes of course, everything affects memory

Answer 2

Yes, your computer is affected. The amount of memory does not change. The speed of the CPU does not change. What DOES change is what happens when you PLAY one of the songs, in which case, memory IS affected, and theCPU now has a heavier load, so when playing tunes, you MAY see a change. Now, for the hardware. The people who say storing these on your disk does nothing except take up space, not true. Think about it, when you access the disk, the disk has to read everything inbetween parts of a file if separated on the disk. The more stuff, the more files, the more fragmented files are, the longer the total access time for the hard disk to retrieve a file. And fragmenting increases the disk thrashing as the system assembles the file from whereever it is scattered over the disk, back and forth, back and forth, and it takes more time than if in a single contiguous group of sectors.. So, yes, disk access can be hurt severely by having so many files on board. Blame Bill Gates for this. Microsoft has not given much (if any) intelligence to the disk operating system to efficiently use space on a hard disk.This problem of disk thrashing gets even worse the less free space on the drive, mainly because of the virtual memory swapping which goes on. So, even with a huge hard drive, the more files and data on board, the slower the drive response overall. You can see it happening by watching the drive access light and the flicker rate. Do a routine defrag (complete, files and directories) to minimize the thrashing from file fragments scattered all over the drive once a week or so. The more writes to your hard disk, the more often you will need to defrag. Reading data just takes time. Writing data causes fragmented files. I would not buy memory sticks, as capacity is too small for the cost. Rather, consider an external USB hard disk. I've seen big ones, 200 GB or so, on sale at Staples or Office Depot for around $120-$150. Too bad my laptop does not have USB, or I'd have bought one so I could unload the laptop hard disk, which is a victim of the "mostly full" thrashing syndrome. Another alternative is get a DVD burner and offload files to a DVD-ROM disk, another thing I can't use on my laptop (sigh), but I do use frequently on my desktop machine for MP3 and video files.

Answer 3

Having music takes up space on your hard drive, but it shouldn't slow down your computer unless you have so much music that it's totally filled your hard drive. With 946 songs, I'd say you're using about 3 to 5Gb. Most recent PC's have 40 to 200Gb hard drives, so this is hardly a problem. If you feel that you have too much stuff on your hard drive, you could defragment your drive. This just tidies up how the files are stored on the hard drive's surface. It won't affect the folders your files are in.

Answer 4

Yes, it can slow the computer down but let me clairify.

Windows uses a variable amount of hard drive space (depending on how much RAM you have and what you're running at that moment but often in the ballpark of almost 1GB) as virtual memory. And so if you have less than 3 gigs of hard drive space you can probably speed up your computer by freeing up some hard drive space.

If you want to see how much space you have left go into your "My Computer", right click on your hard drive, and then click on "Properties" this will show you a pie chart showing how much space you have left.

Answer 5

in many circumstances, definite, especially with domicile windows structures. The greater RAM (GB of reminiscence) the fewer the utility will could flow to the disk. you're able to have greater working on a similar time additionally. no longer obsolutely particular approximately MACs yet assume they could be very comparable. the morepersistent basically potential you could shop greater. 250 GB is sufficient to start up and in case you desire greater USB exterior drives are affordable presently.

Answer 6

NO IT DOES NOT! But it would be a good idea to save those songs to a cd or removable hard drive/memory stick.

Answer 7

Yeah, my computer is starting to lose room because of how much that is on my itunes. It does take up LOTS of space, quickly!

Answer 8

Yea, my PC is the same way, i have like, maybe, over a 1000 songs on it, its pretty slow, even if you love music, try not to have too much.

Answer 9

no music takes up very little space much less than games i wouldnt worry about it unless you are an avid gammer or have a lot of stuff downloaded on your computer