In Windows XP if you go to control panel and select Performance and maintenence then adjust visual effects rhen go to the Advanced tap and look under Virtual memory. What is the difference between that and the physical RAM you could for example buy from Circuit City.
2007-02-28 10:30:52 · 6 answers · asked by Anonymous in Computers & Internet ➔ Hardware ➔ Other - Hardware
This is to Ralph S
Also is Virtual RAM as effective as Physical?
2007-02-28 10:40:34 · update #1
do you mean physical ram is in a hard drive?
2007-02-28 10:37:41 · answer #1 · answered by J C 2 · 0⤊ 2⤋
Physical RAM is the type physically installed on your motherboard (the type you can buy from Circuit City). Virtual memory or RAM is actually a small allocated space on your hard drive. Sometimes applications like photoshop need more memory then is available so it will use the much slower virtual RAM. In windows Vista, a feature called super fetching allows use to use a USB flash drive as virtual memory. Flash memory is much faster then your hard drive yet slower then your RAM making this a useful feature. Windows Vista also stores info for launching applications in your RAM another reason for virtual RAM. Bottem line, virtual RAM is a last resort for running and storing applications. Make sure that you have at least 512MB of RAM if your using XP and 2GB in Vista to prevent the use of virtual memory.
DO NOT change the default setting for virtual RAM, it will slow down your system
2007-02-28 11:03:58 · answer #2 · answered by Kevin K. 4 · 1⤊ 0⤋
Physical RAM refers to the actual RAM circuitry in your computer. Virtual memory doesn't actually exist in reality. It's an artificial memory space your operating system makes your program use. The benefit of doing this is that it allows your computer to swap your application's memory off to disk in pages and relocated in a different physical address. It's now common practice used by all operating systems so that you can use your computer as if it had more RAM than it really has.
2007-02-28 10:38:38 · answer #3 · answered by Ralph S 3 · 2⤊ 0⤋
It basically comes down to speed. RAM is fast VM (Virtual Memory) is slow.
The more RAM you have the less swapping to VM your system will need to do.. Every time you need to swap you take a huge performance hit while things are being read/written to disk.
VM allows you to run more applications simultaneously than you would be able to with just your RAM... most of the time when people see slowness in their system it's because of lack of RAM and not CPU speed. When you don't have enough RAM to run all your current applications or even just your OS your system is constantly swapping and no matter how fast your CPU or RAM is the read/write to disk is going to kill your performance.
2007-02-28 10:47:10 · answer #4 · answered by mackn 3 · 1⤊ 0⤋
Physical RAM is the memory sticks that are inside of your computer. Virtual RAM is hard drive space.
2007-02-28 10:39:29 · answer #5 · answered by martin_pc_maintenance 3 · 1⤊ 0⤋
virtual RAM uses hard drive space as RAM, where physical RAM uses memory modules
2007-02-28 11:08:36 · answer #6 · answered by Matthew P 4 · 0⤊ 0⤋