RAM & Computer Speed
Often times, in the offices in which technical support is provided, clients would ask why their computers are so slow. Most of the time computer users assume that something needs to be updated, but many times, that’s not the case. Once their computer is inspected, it is discovered that it’s not the eight webpages, two Excel spreadsheets, and numerous word documents all open at the same time; the culprit more than likely lies with music streaming and the local weather and/or news app constantly phoning home for updates.
Don’t get us wrong, having a little background music can definitely make the hours pass a little smoother and everyone enjoys watching their favorite show as some background noise throughout the day. Sometimes we need to have a few webpages open for reasons of comparison or we are simply just swamped at work. In today’s office, multi-tasking is essential for efficiency. All of these things directly impact your computer’s performance because they take up space in your RAM. RAM is where these ‘open’ programs store the data of a spreadsheet while you are editing it, or to quickly display a Word document you have minimized in your taskbar.
A computer at rest with the minimum number of applications running (just the Windows operating system, Skype, and Outlook) is using 30% of its 8GB of RAM to maintain over 50 background processes. These processes are things like your audio service, the JAVA update service, which notifies you when an update is available, or your antivirus protection software, which prevent, detects, and removes malware, viruses, and worms from your computer. If your computer only has 4GB of RAM, this means 60% of your RAM is being utilized just to maintain basic operations. Add in several webpages and documents and you’re nearing 100% of RAM usage, which means you have a slow PC on your hands.
If your RAM is full, the computer then begins to relay the data back and forth between the RAM (temporary storage) and the hard drive (physical storage) – and your computer starts to crawl. You can check your RAM speed just by opening the task manager on your computer. With all of this in mind, and if you are the type that needs to have a dozen apps and documents open at once, an upgrade from 4GB to 8GB RAM can very noticeably improve your computer’s performance and your productivity as well and when it comes to computers, having more is better.
If you are in the market for high-quality, low-cost, off-lease refurbished computer equipment for your home or business, contact us at 2nd-Byte and we would love to help you out!
Posted in News