Flashcards

MEMORY

Reasons&Things English 6 cards

Cards in this deck (6)

1What is RAM and what happens when it loses power?RAM is Random Access Memory and the memory on RAM is volatile, meaning when it loses power all, of the data gets wiped
2What is ROM and what does it do/is responsible for?Read Only Memory, it cannot be written to,(except in rare circumstances). It holds the data responsible for booting up the device, thus if it becomes damaged you cannot boot your device
3What is Cache memory and where is it located?Cache memory is located within the CPU as extremely fast memory which is volatile and at most is usually 12MB or less.
4What is Virtual Memory and what does it do?Virtual Memory is what your computer does when there are multiple programs requiring more RAM than is actually present on your machine. Thus some space on your HDD/SSD is taken up as "virtual RAM" however this memory is much slower than traditional RAM
5What is thrashing?Thrashing is what happens when your computer desires/needs too much "virtual memory", your hard drive goes into overdrive and keeps on swapping between memory storage's for different programs thus quite notably slowing down your computer
6How can having more RAM prevent your computer from thrashing/slowing down?Higher amounts of RAM mean that your computer has to rely less on "virtual memory" as more traditional/intended RAM is available. This means less work for the hard drive and thus much lower chances of thrashing occurring.