First What Is RAM?
RAM is just a fancy way of saying random access memory in the tech world. What that really means is RAM obtains, fetches and instructs data that is stored temporarily in the memory.
How Do You Know When To Upgrade?
If you are running with 2GB or less RAM in your system, you could probably benefit from an upgrade even if you barely use your PC or run a single application at a time.
It is relatively simple to open Task Manager and check whether your memory usage is reaching the limit. If you consider yourself a power user, you’ll want to consider upgrading your PC to 6 or 8 GB of RAM.
Reasons To Upgrade Your RAM
The biggest benefit of upgrading your PC’s memory is better multi-tasking, especially for those of us using RAM-hogging applications like Photoshop, Outlook, or Google Chrome 5. Having a lot of memory means that you can quickly switch back and forth between the different applications.
To put it another way, your RAM generally does not make your PC faster, it just allows it to do more things at once. If your single application uses 200 MB of RAM, it won’t matter if you’ve got 2 or 8 GB of total system memory, but if you’ve got 10 windows open using 200 MB each, then you are probably going to benefit from an upgrade.
Very few applications are going to use large chunks of your system memory, but there are some applications that will benefit greatly from an upgrade. Image editing applications like Photoshop, video/audio editing applications, or virtual machines like VirtualBox or VMware will use as much RAM as you can spare.
So if you are a chronic multi-tasker, do yourself a favor and make sure you have an adequate amount of RAM to support all your electronic endeavors!
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