How Much RAM Do You Really Need?

The amount of RAM you need depends on your needs, but in general, 4 GB of RAM is sufficient for office use, navigation. 8 GB of RAM is enough for some games.

Is the amount of RAM an impossible question? The necessary amount of RAM for our daily needs is a question that has become almost mystical in the manner of the Holy Grail. Everyone gives their opinion and it ranges from good answers to pure bullshit. Despite the fact that technology and hardware have changed, we realize that the RAM issue has never been resolved. But we could sum it up in one sentence:No, just because you have more RAM doesn’t mean your machine will be faster.

More RAM = Faster?

Many people assume that adding more RAM helps speed up their PC and that’s true in most cases. But this extra RAM is not going to increase the speed at which your CPU processes system code, but RAM can relieve the CPU in some aspects, especially on PCs that have 2 GB of RAM. And that’s the whole point of these questions, because all the easy answers about never having enough RAM come from the old days when most PCs had 2 GB of RAM.

And when you know the lightness of Windows, these 2 GB of RAM were absolutely not enough. And when the RAM was exceeded, then the system used what is called virtual memory .

Virtual memory is a file on your hard drive that functions as temporary storage when your PC’s physical RAM becomes full. For example, virtual memory made it possible to run applications that consumed a lot of resources even if all the available memory had been used.

When using these applications, Windows exchanged data on this special file as long as necessary. And when the physical RAM returned to its normal state, Windows put the data back into the special file. This back and forth movement has caused this memory to be often referred to as Swap memory . Note that Linux also uses this technique. On Windows this special file is called pagefile.sys or swapfile.sys depending on your system and it is located in the Windows or system32 directory . It is part of the hidden files.

This Swap process slowed down the machine, because in the past, mechanical hard drives were often used. And we ended up with PCs that crashed completely, because the PC no longer followed the speed of the applications, Swap or not Swap.

In fact, anyone who had a PC running Windows XP between the late 1990s and 2000s had this shitty problem of PC crashing due to insufficient RAM. At that time, most OS’s were 32-bit and even though they could technically handle 4GB of RAM, RAM sticks were much more expensive than today and that’s why we have all these items that informed us about the amount of RAM we needed.