Dear Geek,
My old PC is getting slower and slower but I don’t want to buy a new one. New PCs have lots of memory – would an external drive help?
Hampered of Herne Bay.
Dear Hampered,
Probably not! Megabytes, gigabytes and terabytes it’s easy to get confused when upgrading your PC.
The term memory is often confused between hard drive and RAM. When we talk about memory we mean RAM.
Per gigabyte, RAM is far more expensive than hard drive. It is also much faster. This is where programs and documents are held while you work with them.
Hard drive space is cheap but much slower. It can hold information when the PC is turned off and this is where your programs and documents are stored when you’re not using them.
Performance is affected when RAM fills up and needs to spill over onto the slower hard disk.
Imagine your desk before computers. You have limited room on the desk and when you turn off you have to put everything away in your filing cabinet. If you’re busy (writing a letter, looking up a phone number, putting photos in the album) you run out of space on the desk. To make some space you put things into your pending tray – you don’t want to close them down and put them in the filing cabinet.
When your desk is full, every time you want to look at something different, something else goes in the pending tray and the thing you want taken out.
That constant swapping back and forth is what makes your hard drive light flash manically when your PC is running slowly.
So the answer is a bigger desk, not a bigger filing cabinet. RAM is almost always your “biggest bang for your buck” upgrade. For as little as £20, a RAM boost can make a huge difference. Take a look at this link on how to find RAM for your PC.
Geek x
A Microsoft Certified Professional with many years of large corporate experience and training, he now focuses on helping small businesses make the most of their IT.
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