Memory in a normal desktop computer today is organized in two different places:
- In the physical memory chips, attached to your motherboard.
- In a "paging file" on the hard drive of your pc.
One must not confuse the hard drive of being memory, as it is simply just long term data storage.
Memory is further organized into just regular memory, or what is called virtual memory. Virtual memory can exist on the memory chips, and on your hard drive in the paging file.
On the next level, memory is organized on a per program basis. A program loads up, takes what it needs, then continues on working. As the program needs to store more information in the memory, it make take up more and more. That is why if you load a 20 page
Word document, it would take up more space than a two page
Word document.
And memory optimizers simply do not work. All they do is move memory from the memory chips to your hard drive, making it seem like they are actually working. They actually make programs slower, since they have to reload that memory from the hard drive, into the memory.
