What Is RAM and What Does It Do?

What is RAM?

RAM stands for random access memory and is the temporary storage component (short-term memory) of a computer. RAM holds all the data you’re currently using, from the website you’re looking at to the movement of your mouse from one side of the screen to the other.Whenever you do anything on your computer, you execute a lot of processes. Type a sentence, save a document, jump in a video game — behind all of that work is your RAM. And it’s much easier (faster) to do those tasks if the data is stored in your computer’s RAM, where it’s easily accessible, rather than the hard drive (SSD or HDD).

Now that you know what RAM is and what it stands for, you’ll have a much better idea of how RAM works to help your computer streamline your work.

What does RAM do?

RAM stores the data that helps your computer perform its most important tasks, such as loading apps, browsing websites, and editing documents. RAM lets you open apps and files quickly, because your computer can easily find the data in its short-term memory. Keeping the info you regularly use easily accessible helps your computer work more quickly.

As short-term memory, RAM is designed to work with small bits of data at a time. For example, when you click on a link to go to a new website, a series of capacitors and transistors (basically switches) in the RAM’s circuit board turn on or off, letting your computer translate the link into the web page you see.

If you’re working on a document or spreadsheet and want to save your work for later, you’ll move it from being stored in your RAM, where it can be found immediately, into the long-term storage of your hard drive. And your computer will need to do more work to pull up data from your hard drive (longer-term memory).

When working with RAM, you can access data in any order — it’s random access, not sequential access. RAM is directly connected to your computer’s motherboard, allowing for the fastest speeds possible. The more RAM you have, the better your computer will perform.

One thing that takes up a lot of your RAM's capacity is your operating system, and it might be getting dragged down by junk files or other unnecessary data. Meanwhile, some background processes tend to work all the time, even when they don’t need to.

Thankfully, AVG TuneUp is a dedicated junkware removal tool that also features a built-in Sleep Mode, which disables unneeded background processes to help free up RAM. Try it today to streamline your computer and get more space for what you really need.

Why is RAM important?

RAM can process data at lightning-fast speeds. Its ability to randomly access data means you can get to any spot in the RAM just as quickly as any other spot. RAM sits on top of the processor, which explains why your processor can do tasks seemingly instantaneously.

RAM is what you use to do basically anything on your computer. Sure, you can browse through the contents of your hard drive and look through folders and files, but opening any of those files means pulling out a copy and placing it onto the RAM. Only there can data be read and written in nanoseconds.For example, when you edit a Microsoft Word file, you might think you're working deep inside the folders of your hard drive. But, in computing terms, your hard drive is quite far from your workstation.

RAM puts the information you need right in front of your processor. Imagine wanting to read a paragraph from your favorite book — you could ask a friend to read it to you over the phone (like calling on your hard drive), or you could simply grab the book and read it yourself.

If it had to rely solely on its hard drive, your computer would slow to a crawl, while its memory became overloaded trying to find all the information needed to carry out normal work. And don’t bother trying to boot up your computer without RAM — you’ll simply get an error message.