What makes it slow!?

[MiniMan.]

hi i have macbook with only 512RAM and i wanted to no is it 'real memory' or 'virtual memory' That slows down the computer

Thanks

 

[liketom]

if you up the ram to 1gb you will be very happy with the speed

 

[mad jew]

Neither slows down the computer. Real memory is actual memory sticks. Virtual memory is a chunk of your hard drive pretending to be memory, but is much much slower. You need both. On an Intel machine, you really need 1GB or more of real memory to work properly. As long as you have plenty of free space on your hard drive, you don't have to worry about the virtual memory so much.

 

[MiniMan.]

thanks this helps alot

 

[iW00t]

If you have very little real memory your computer has to constantly write contents of your memory out to make room for new data. This old data is then stored on your hard disk. During such a process your computer can't do much of anything, it can't run the new program until the bits for that app has space in the memory to load to, which is in turn waiting for some old space to free up, which is in turn dependent on your hard disk drive. In microprocessor time a disk access is an extremely slow process, so you can just imagine how much of your computer's juice is spent waiting for data being written to disk.

 

[MiniMan.]

thnks