Something that totally, completely frustrates me is the all-too-common confusion of a computer’s memory and a computer’s hard drive space. You don’t know how many people I’ve talked to who say something like this:
“I bought this new program. It says I need 16MB of RAM and I figured that was okay since I had 1.6GB of RAM in my machine!”
::shaking head:: Oh boy. I love it. Here is a quick lesson. Memory is NOT hard drive space! The hard drive is where you store your programs and data. It’s “The C Drive”. Just like “The A Drive”, only much bigger. Memory is like a scratchpad for the computer – it uses it to help expedite commands and so forth.
Many people will say they’re “out of memory” when the truth is, they’re out of hard drive space. If they really do run out of memory, then there is a problem with the way their PC is set up.
Likewise, I recently met someone who thought the fact that he had a 486 meant that he had 486MB of hard drive space.
So. Memory is not your hard drive. Your hard drive is not your memory. Please remember this. Thanks. -pm
Ryan Macmichael is on special assignment in Tijuana.
Posted in Technology
Aanen April 3, 2008, 12:15 pm
I used to deal with that kind of stuff all the time at my first job, before I got laid off. I once had to describe how to resize a window for one of the transcription folks. NOT fun!