Week 7: Muddy

Memory is an extremely important part of any computer system. Using lots of different applications takes up memory and can even use all of the available memory in the computer (either 32 or 64 megabytes of RAM). One way to make it seem like there is more memory when there really isn't is by using virtual memory.

Virtual memory is when the computer looks at areas of the RAM that has not been used for long periods of time and copies that data to the hard drive to free up space on the RAM.

I wasn't sure if there was data that wound up getting deleted or permanently moved to the hard drive, but it turns out that as soon as there is available space on the RAM again, the originally swapped file will go back to where it was on the RAM.

This seems kind of complicated for a computer system to do, and it really is since virtual memory slows down the computer. A simple solution is just to get more memory for your computer and this will make you have to use virtual memory less often (and your computer will run faster too).

Check out the article "How Virtual Memory Works" to read more about this process.