Now, this is prertty much obvious to many people, and if you’re reading this blog it is probably obvious to you as well, but I’m sure many people also know that they have friends who will incorrectly refer to their computer’s hard disk space. A common example…
Friend: “My computer isn’t fast enough, how do I make it faster?”
Me: “How much memory do you have?”
Friend: “250 g bytes”
Me: “What?”
Friend: “My computer came with 250GB”
Me: “No, not your hard drive space, your RAM.”
Friend: “My What?”
At that point, I’d usually guide them to the whole right clicking My Computer > Properties thing to the part where it will usually tell them that either A: they’ve been running off 256 Megs of RAM with a Windows XP computer or B: they’ve been running off 1GB of RAM on a Vista PC. And so, I casually explain to them the difference between Hard Disk space and Memory, and I can tell by the end of the conversation, despite my best efforts to dumb down my explanation 10 notches, that they still have no idea what I’m trying to tell them.
“But how does my computer store stuff then?”
If you or someone else has absolutely no idea still what the difference is, I’ve found both simple and complicated ways to describe it.
RAM and Hard Drive space are like long and short term memory.
If you have a test coming up tomorrow, but you forgot about it and you just stayed up until 2 AM drinking, then probably the first thing you’ll do in the morning is 1: find something to relieve you of your terrible hangover and 2: cram as much as you can for fast access into your head. Well, if a computer wants to access something incredibly fast, it stores the information in its RAM, or Random Access Memory. Here, it can be accessed and changed at an extremely high speeds, unilke your hard drive. However, some people think everything they do is stored in their RAM forever. They’re lucky this isn’t the case, because anything stored in your RAM ceases to exist shortly after you turn off your computer, thus explaining why when you start up Windows takes so long to boot, because it has to load all its shit back into your RAM, taking significant amounts of time.
Hard drive space is like long term memory, it takes longer to get it there (although it still happens so fast that you really won’t notice), but it will be there for a very long time. Your hard drive will retain information until:
- It breaks (this happens sooner than a lot of people think, but its still long enough to where you’d have to be crazy to keep a computer long enough for it to happen)
- You or someone else wipes your hard drive.
- You visit a porn website and install a virus because in your current state you’ll click “Yes” to anything, as long as the stupid dialog box gets out of the way of the views of the new High-res jpegs you just found.
- You delete the file.
If all else fails…
Hard Drives look like this:
And RAM looks like this:
Seeing that they probably do those “Find the differences between these two pictures” puzzles that you’ll most likely find in the latest edition of Nick Jr Magazine, they should be able to spot at least a few minor differences. If they can’t, just be honest and tell them that they may want to have a repair shop take care of the problem and not do it themselves, because else you’ll get a call a week later saying they busted their computer by shoving the RAM forcibly into a PCI slot.
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So next time someone frustrates you by saying “I’ve got 500GB of ram in my computer and you told me you only have 3″, you’ll be able to explain to them that it is because you actually knew what you were talking about, and also give them the comparison above. I’ve used it for like 4 people, and they all got a pretty good understanding.
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