Keyboard shortcut, and what is "Ram"

Hey!, A nice light back to basic lesson, and a quick tip this week. 

I am not a huge user of keyboard shortcuts, but a few that I do use are to copy, cut and paste. The most common way that newer users perform these functions is to highlight the text they want to work with, then left click on the mouse and select either copy, cut or paste from the drop down menu.

A much faster way that you can do this is to select and highlight the text you want to work with, and then press the control key "Ctr" and the "c" key at the same time to 'copy' the text, or press the "Ctr" key and the "x" key at the same time to 'cut' the text, next click on where you want to place the new text, and press the "Ctr" key and the "v" key at the same time, to 'paste' the text back in. These are known as keyboard shortcuts, and once you get to know them and get in the habit of using them, they make your tasks much faster and easier.

The big talk when buying a new computer, laptop, of even a tablet is, how much "Ram" it has. So what is Ram exactly and what does it do?

Ram is what they call "Working Memory", that means that when you boot your device up, it takes everything it needs to work with' and loads it into the Ram for easy and quick access.

An easy way to understand this, is to imagine that you are going to cook a cake.

Well when you start, you go to your pantry and get all the ingredients, bowls, and utensils you need for the cake and put them out on your bench so that everything is with in your reach and easy to access, this will make mixing the cake a lot quicker and easier.

Well your ram is like the bench, it is your working area, and the more you are cooking or the more complicated the recipe is, the more bench space you need to fit everything on comfortably. Once you run out of bench space you have to walk to your pantry and look for what you want amongst all the other items, find it, and then find some more space to work , this will slow the whole cooking process down.

So to sum all that up, your Ram stores all the ingredients for your computing tasks, and if you are doing tasks like working with large pictures of video, these are the equivalent to having a complicated recipe, and require a lot more Ram. If you don't have enough Ram the processor has to go to the hard drive and find what you need, then make some space on the hard drive to use, this slows the whole process right down.

Depending on how you use your device, normally 2 gigabytes of Ram will be sufficient for your requirements, but if you are a heavy user and have a lot of programs open at the one time, or work a lot with video processing, you may want to increase this to 4 gigabytes. Some of the latest systems are coming out with 8 gigabytes, but the average user will never get the benefit of this much, and you  need to have a certain model of your operating system before it will recognize this much Ram.

I hope this makes sense to you and helps you to understand a bit more of the jargon behind your PC.