01-03-2007, 07:22 AM

hi i have macbook with only 512RAM and i wanted to no is it 'real memory' or 'virtual memory' That slows down the computer

Thanks

01-03-2007, 08:09 AM

if you have 512mb ram in your macbook then this is real memory. The system may use virtual memory on top of the 512mb of ram by using some virtual memory using the hard drive. hope this helps

01-03-2007, 08:32 AM

Virtual memory is there to swap inactive Applications to the hard drive. Lets say you are running iPhoto and iWeb at the same time. When you want to import a new album in iPhoto, it may require considerable amount of memory. At this point it will swap the data of the iWeb app. which is running in the background to the hard drive. When you start using iWeb again, it will immediately write the data back to the real memory. This process continues as long as you don't have enough RAM to meet the demand.

01-03-2007, 10:54 AM

One very important thing to remember is that virtual memory is much slower than real RAM memory. Your hard drive cannot communicate with your processor anywhere near as fast as the RAM. So any time you are relying on virtual memory, your computer is going to slow down.

This is especially true if you are also trying to access data from the drive at the same time. Time spent swapping "memory" information from the hard drive is time that it cannot be reading data (eg, loading your photograph).