Computer memory questions?

Question

What is the difference between virtual and physical memory?
What can I purchase to improve my virtual memory?
And lastly, is 384 MB sufficient for allocation as RAM?

Just before posting this I was having trouble with my virtual memory and I just double it from 192 to 384. Should this improve the performance of my computer enough or do I need more. It says 384 is the maximum.

I'm gonna restart and see if it's any faster...

Answer 1

Physical Memory: RAM chips
Virtual Memory: Available space on your harddrive temporarily used by the system like RAM chips.

Usually your computer starts using virtual memory when all physical memory space has been taken up by programs running on your computer.

Although virtual memory will allow you to keep more programs running at the same time (because you have more overall memory space to run them), it actually takes the computer more time to access virtual memory. Afterall, RAM is used primarily to run applications because it is faster memory, while HD memory is used for storage because it has more capacity at the cost of speed.

I would not recommend increasing virtual memory if you want your computer to run faster. You need to increase your physical memory for faster performance (so... you need to install/add RAM chips with more space). If you want to increase your virtual memory, you probably only need to make more space on your HD.

384 MB is not a lot of RAM by today's standards. Depending on what type of computer you're running and the operating system the requirements are different. I can only speak for PC Windows (sorry not a Mac owner). Running Windows XP on a PC recommends 512 MB RAM.

Answer 2

Virtual memory is a common part of most operating systems on desktop computers. It has become so common because it provides a big benefit for users at a very low cost.

Most computers today have at the very least 256 MB of RAM available for the CPU to use (physical). Unfortunately, that amount of RAM is not enough to run all of the programs that most users expect to run at once.

For example, if you load the operating system, an e-mail program, a Web browser and word processor into RAM simultaneously, 256 megabytes is not enough to hold it all. If there were no such thing as virtual memory, then once you filled up the available RAM your computer would have to say, "Sorry, you can not load any more applications. Please close another application to load a new one." With virtual memory, what the computer can do is look at RAM for areas that have not been used recently and copy them onto the hard disk. This frees up space in RAM to load the new application.

Because this copying happens automatically, you don't even know it is happening, and it makes your computer feel like is has unlimited RAM space even though it only has 256 megabytes installed. Because hard disk space is so much cheaper than RAM chips, it also has a nice economic benefit.

The read/write speed of a hard drive is much slower than RAM, and the technology of a hard drive is not geared toward accessing small pieces of data at a time. If your system has to rely too heavily on virtual memory, you will notice a significant performance drop. The key is to have enough RAM to handle everything you tend to work on simultaneously -- then, the only time you "feel" the slowness of virtual memory is is when there's a slight pause when you're changing tasks. When that's the case, virtual memory is perfect.

When it is not the case, the operating system has to constantly swap information back and forth between RAM and the hard disk. This is called thrashing, and it can make your computer feel incredibly slow.

The area of the hard disk that stores the RAM image is called a page file. It holds pages of RAM on the hard disk, and the operating system moves data back and forth between the page file and RAM. On a Windows machine, page files have a .SWP extension.

Usually twice the amount of physical RAM you have is a good amount of virtual memory, but whatever works best for you is what I would advise.

Hope I was helpful!

Answer 3

at start you need to knoe that ram is different from virtual memory
physical memory is the memory by hardware such as ram anc cach
virtual memory is paging file place on your hard drive (hdd)
that is being used like the ram to store temporary files
and no 384 is not enough
put page files on the other local drive beside C
buy ram to increas your physical memory but make sure you know the type of you ram for example ddr

Answer 4

My suggestion would be just to allow Windows to allocate the virtual memory automatically.

If you continue to run out of memory you will probably need to buy more memory or check your anti-virus to make sure a virus isn't hogging your memory or something.

Good luck!