The next part of the computer we will be discussing is the Random Access Memory.
RAM stands for Random Access Memory and is the short term memory of the computer while the hard drive is the long term memory and storage for the computer. The problem is applications hold data and the CPU needs to access those files at high speeds, it would be way too slow for it to fetch from the hard drive which can be as large as 1TB. Therefore the RAM acts as an assistant to the CPU holding data from popular applications like Google Chrome or Microsoft Word so the CPU can access it at a suitable speed.
For example, if we need to compute:
2 + 2
The keyboard sends the input to the application.
The data is temporarily stored in RAM.
The CPU reads the data from RAM.
The CPU performs the addition (2 + 2 = 4).
The result (4) is sent to the display and shown on your screen.
RAM needs electricity to work, if we shut off the computer all of that data is lost instantly, unlike a hard drive where we will most likely have the data without electricity or the computer being on.
Most computers have a limited amount of RAM such as 4GB, 8GB, 16GB etc. Therefore if we overwork the computer we can run out of random access memory i.e. the space the CPU needs to grab instructions from causing our computer to not operate effectively. This means the computer has less free RAM available to store and quickly access the instructions and data it needs causing applications to become slow, unresponsive or even in extreme cases crash.
In conclusion the RAM is a fast temporary memory space that is utilized by the CPU to process data and complete the instructions that the data contains while the Hard drive is the main storage that is larger and is designed to hold data, files and applications.
