EXTRA MEMORY QUESTION..

RAM is used only when the computer is ON. it's volatile.. meaning when you turn the machine off the information stored in RAM is gone. whereas the hard drive stays when the computer is off.

RAM is used to store running applications and data related to those applications. including OS X, and say iTunes, and iPhoto, etc. when you quit those applications the memory is Freed. essentially more ram let's you run more applications at once and allows applications to have more memory available to them to store information.

Ram is fast, very very fast. hard drive is slow. when you run out of ram space, the computer takes part of this ram memory and transfers it to the hard drive. freeing up the ram for more important things. if you need to access the part of memory that was saved to the hard drive, then it has to swap from hard drive back to ram, but typically has to free up space in the ram first.. so it takes a chunk from the ram, copies it to the hard drive, then takes that other part of ram that was placed on the hard drive and puts it back in ram... complicated... yes.. but basically more ram means faster response when using lots of applications and applications that require lots of ram

 

Good explanation Logik....

Congrats on the purchase of our new iMac forthebrave!