Why do I need more ram?

Keeping your computer running fast.

Computer memory is nothing but a room if you will. Imagine all your possessions at home are in one small room and you need to look for something there.

You have to wade through all the stuff  to find what you are looking for in the far corner under everything else.

Now imagine you have a very large room and all your stuff is laid out nice and everything is visible.  You go and pick up what you need without wading through all the other stuff to find it.

Computer memory is the same. Small memory lots of looking and slows down the computer. Lots of memory and the computer cruises along nice and fast without strain.

The processor is nothing else but the motor. Does the hard work of calculations. Just like the engine in your car. Small engine up the hill just struggles and you have to switch back to lower/slower gear to be able to go up. Large engine, more power and your car can handle it easily.

So While the processor speed is important to have a fast computer, but without lots of memory it’ll be bogged down and slow going because it have to empty the memory a lot onto the hard drive.

If you don’t have sufficient memory than the processor will empty the data (it don’t momentarily need)  from memory onto the hard drive as temporary storage.  When the current task is over than it have to go back to the hard drive and get that data back into memory because it needs it for the next task.

Say you have outlook open and the memory is filled up by it. Now you need word and the processor will empty outlook onto the hard drive temporarily and place word into memory. Now you want to send that word letter by outlook, the processor will empty word onto the hard drive and load outlook into memory from the hard drive .

Loading it to the hard drive is just like if you have your stuff in two separate rooms and you have to look for something.

With lots of memory all that can fit in and the computer is much faster.