Losing Your Virtual Memory? By Dave Page At Isnare.com Ezine Articles

The average computer sold on the market today is either 128 or 256 megabytes of ram. Unfortunately, that isn’t enough to do basic task on the computer without using it up. To compensate for the lack of ram your computer gets extra ram from free areas of your hard disk. This ensures that you have enough ram to do things such as run multiple programs at once. You can see that the more computers advance, the disk space is what’s being multiplied and not the megabytes of ram This is by far the most effective and economical approach to take in order to have more ram. When your compare the cost of ram to the cost of hard disk you can get a better understanding of this. I located a seller offering a Dell Dimension 2350 512 megabytes of ram for $34.99 while EBay had a listing for a Seagate 320GB SATA Hard Disk Drive at the same price. Clearly the 320 gigabytes outweighs the 512 megabytes which can both be used for ram.

Virtual Memory Freeware Tools

Most virtual memory applications usually try to increase your computers’ physical memory which you will use for ram. This option is great if you need to free up just enough space to get things done. The freeware tools are also known as the RAM defragmenters. Their job is to free the portions of the RAM which are simply wasted and are remaining in the computer as useless space. When there is no more free memory space available with the RAM, the Windows crashes take place. These tools often stop these from occurring so that the memory space is increased significantly. You can get the licensed versions of these freeware tools for a few dollars more. Some of the websites allow you to download the trial versions of this software for free which you can try out for a certain period and check the utility. This is a cheaper option to take if you don’t want to spend more money for ram or a disk drive.

How does the virtual memory work?

As you all know that the virtual memory of a computer is a common section of the desktop as well as the operating system. A 128 or 256 MB RAM can never be space enough for simultaneously loaded applications like Email programs, two operating systems like Linux and Microsoft windows and word processors. When the Ram is absolutely stuffed with all these programs, it will show a message stating the unavailability of adequate memory.

But it is the virtual memory that comes into the picture in these situations. The virtual memory helps the unused parts of the RAM to get copied at the hard disk so that they can become available. This takes place automatically without even letting you know. Still sometimes you might have seen a small window popping up to say that the virtual memory is low. This is when there is no more space left to be used in the RAM.

Upgrading the hard disk has proven to be a better way to increase the virtual memory of a computer. Hence, now onwards when you visit an electronics shop in search of high capacity computers, check out the hard disk space apart from the Ram and also look for provisions to increase the space.

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