Memory/Ram Faq's   MEMORY INTRODUCTION You already know that the computer in front of you has memory.            Memory which is commonly referred to as RAM (Random Access Memory) is a temporary (Volatile) storage area utilized by the CPU. Before a program can be ran the program is loaded into the memory which allows the CPU direct access to the program.  Memory is a necessity for any computer and it is recommend that you have at least 64MB of memory for your IBM or Macintosh.      Memory is commonly confused with Hard Drive Space. There are two types of memory the first type of memory is the memory explained in the above paragraph this memory is available in computer chips.  The other type of memory is actually Hard Drive Space which is stored on the computer Hard Disk Drive . The Hard drive is actually a physical drive which contains several parts and is generally larger then the amount of memory found in your computer. What is Virtual Memory?           Most computers today have something like 32 or 64 megabytes of RAM available for the CPU to use. 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, 32 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 32 megabytes installed.  Because hard disk space is so much cheaper than RAM chips, it also has a nice economic benefit.   By clicking on the next page button below it will take you directly to our troubleshooting guide