Random Access Memory

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Random Access Memory (or RAM) is defined as any memory that can be read from (or written to) in any order you like. Think of how you look up a number in the phone book. That’s very similar to how the computer reads data from RAM.
The opposite of RAM would be SAM, or Serial Access Memory.

SAM would be the equivalent of having to start at the beginning of the phone book and read each phone number in order until you find the one you were looking for. It seems inefficient, but it works well for things like tapes drives or modem buffers, where the access pattern is always from beginning to end.

In colloquial terms, most people refer to their computer’s main memory when they use the term RAM. More specifically, most computers use DDR SDRAM for their primary data storage.

There are many online sellers of PC RAM, including the following:

Crucial (www.crucial.com)
Kingston (www.kingston.com)

Both of these web sites offer an easy to use configuration menu to help pick the best type of RAM for your system.

Depending on the type of operating system you are using, different amounts of RAM may be appropriate. Older computers running Windows 95 and Windows 98 could run with as little as 16 Megabytes of RAM. Nowadays, 256 Megabytes can be still be found pre-installed on some Windows XP machines, but 512 MB or even 1 Gigabyte is fast becoming the minimum RAM requirement for today’s PC. Using less RAM means that more data will have to be moved to and from the hard drive for temporary bonus storage. This greatly slows the overall performance of a computer.

Apple Macintosh computers use an operating system called OSX, which requires a little more RAM than Windows XP for optimal performance. And if you’re looking to run Linux as your operating system, you’re in luck! There are dozens of Linux distributions, with a wide range of minimum RAM requirements, so there’s probably a distribution which will run well on your PC, no matter how much RAM you have.

Next Page: Read Only Memory

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