How To Check Your Computer's RAM

• First, a little background: If we think of your computer as a living organism then it has three main organs: the CPU, the Hard Drive and the RAM. These three components make up the brain of your computer. The CPU is responsible for all of the processing that is required. The faster the CPU the quicker your computer can complete tasks. The Hard Drive is responsible for storage. Think of it as long-term memory. Everything that your computer needs to remember is stored on your hard drive. In that case, RAM should be considered short-term memory. When your computer is processing data it uses your RAM. While RAM (short-term) memory cannot hold as much information and can't hold it for as along as your hard drive it can move the data much, much faster. This is important because it constantly needs to feed your CPU data or else your CPU is constantly waiting. So it's important that your computer has a good amount of RAM or else you'll start to use your hard-drive for short-term and it's much slower. Most computers that are bogged are so because of a lack of RAM.
  
  
• Right-click on the status bar and select "Task Manager".
  
  
  
• So, we're going to find out how much Physical RAM we have on our computer and how much RAM we are currently using. First thing is under the "Physical Memory (K)" box for the "Total" value. In the case below it is 1046904. Now we need how much we're using by looking under the "Commit Charge (K)" box for the "Total" value which in this case is 841742. These values are in kilobytes so if we convert them it's stating that we have about 1 gigabyte of RAM and we're currently using 800 megabytes. So, since the committed RAM is less than the Physical RAM, we're running fine. However, if you look at the picture above in the "Commit Charge (K)" box for the "Peak" value you'll see that it's 2518512. That means that most RAM we've used has been about 2.5 gigabytes. When this occurs the computer will really bog down.
  
  
  
• So make sure that you've got enough RAM for your computer or else your wasting the power of your CPU. A good rule of thumb for you Vista users is 512K of RAM. If you'd like to find out more about RAM or get a professional opinion from a technician in your area you can have an appointment scheduled at www.UniversePoint.com/Checkup