what is a vertual memory & what is physical memory?

Answer 1

Virtual memory is the swap space alloted on the hard disk. Whereas physical memory are the RAM chips inside the computer located on the motherboard

Answer 2

Physical memory is the amount of RAM you have physically installed inside your computer. Virtual memory is used when Windows runs out of physical memory.

Virtual memory is actually just the contents of your RAM temporarily copied to your hard drive. An example would be if you load a program that takes 500MB of memory, and you only have 400MB or RAM. The extra 100MB would be stored on the hard drive in virtual memory.

The virtual memory file is also called a "swap file" or a "page file". In Windows XP it's saved at the root of your hard drive with the filename "pagefile.sys".

Answer 3

Physical memory is RAM. Virtual memory is diskspace that your processor temporarily uses for RAM. In the Windows world, it's the paging file. On a Linux computer, it's a partition on your hard drive dedicated to that purpose.

On systems without virtual memory you simply read and write to RAM and when you run out of space you're out of luck. With systems using virtual memory the hardware is designed to play shell games with programs so that pages of memory can be written to disk and read back in a way that can be made transparent to the running program.

Answer 4

Physical memory is the RAM installed on the motherboard made up of fast silicon memory chips. You may have different combinations of these "sticks" (a stick has several chips) in different sizes. For example, you may have a 1gb and two 512mb sticks installed for a total physical RAM of 2gb.

Virtual memory is made up from storage space on your hard drive that the operating system uses when there's not enough physical memory. Because it's on disk, it's much slower.

Answer 5

Physical memory is the actual sticks of memory chips inside the computer, virtual memory is the extension of memory to your hard drive as a file.

Answer 6

Virtual memory is the amount of hard drive space used to speed up your computer. Physical memory is a random access memory module or RAM, which is used to read binary values in machine language of ones and zeroes. RAM is faster because it is like Morse code transmitted in hyperspeed. Virtual memory requires the computer to write the binary ones and zeroes to a single file and then read them again to make use of them. There are ways to make your virtual memory more effective though. I have listed them below:

Answer 7

Virtual memory (VM) are memory space usable by a computer but resides on a hard drive whereas physical memory are one usable by a computer that are independently installed on a system normally known as RAM.

VM is used by modern OS that requires more memory than what RAM can provides.