What is virtual memory ?

Virtual memory is a kind of memory which is created by our operating system on a small portion of our system's hard disk according to our RAM size, in order to handle or manage more address space if RAM is not capable to hold overall address space.

A common mistake done by people to consider virtual memory that virtual memory holds data but believe me nothing like that. Virtual memory only holds data address instead, i.e. called address space and your RAM also holds address space not data. When your RAM is no more capable of holding address space it transfers the rest of the address space on virtual memory , which is reserved memory space on your system's hard disk to achieve this task. You can also manage (increase or decrease) your system's virtual memory. To increase virtual memory read my PC tune up post.

One important thing to let you know that people always says if you increase your virtual memory then you need not more RAM. However nothing like that, virtual memory can help you to achieve the same task up to a limited extent but it can not be equivalent to RAM just because virtual memory is created on hard disk which is sequential access memory however your RAM is a random access memory which makes RAM faster as compare to your HDD, then how it can be possible. So always use RAM to increase your PC performance except increasing virtual memory.

So we have learned now, What is virtual memory ? And what are the differences between RAM and virtual memory, keep learning from computerflicks. Please leave comments.