Tutorial Blog 1: Hardware, I hardly knew anything about it

Hello everybody,

My name is Funky Fred, I'm from Germany and this is my first blog. Thanks for reading and I hope you will enjoy it.

Today is going to be about one topic which I found particularly interesting out of the first four weeks of the course Computing in the Business Environment. I have to admit that I thought that I am pretty educated about how a computer works but the lectures about hardware proved me wrong. I hardly knew the details of all that is going on inside my computer.

One of the things I didn't know is that one buys RAM (Random Access Memory) mounted on devices called DIMM (Dual Inline Memory Module). I did of course know that the memory is only on the chips on that device but I didn't know that these Devices are called DIMM and they are actually the circuit boards that connect the memory chips. On picture 1 you can see a standard DIMM and this is how they look like in my old desktop computer at home. 

 Picture 1: Standard DIMM (Source: www.tech-faq.com)

Newer high-performance DIMMs have such a high clock rate that they come with heat sinks. Picture 2 shows one of these modern high-performance DIMMs. 

 Picture 2: High-performance DIMM (Source: en.wikipedia.org)

When you go to the store to buy new memory, you will most probably find two key technology types namely DDR2 and DDR3 (Double Data Rate). DDR 3 is the newer technology and has a higher performance with lower energy use. Very modern high-performance motherboards also use technologies that are called dual or triple channel. This means that the processor can access the memory on dual or triple highways and this increases performance substantially. If one of these technologies is used by the motherboard, the DIMMs will have to be installed in so-called teams of two or three.

Finally, what is also very interesting and what I didn’t know before is the consequence of having insufficient RAM in your PC. All your programs and applications are running on the RAM of your computer. If the capacity of the RAM is fully used but the computer needs more, it will fake RAM using the regular hard disk making it a virtual memory. This process slows your computer down enormously because the regular hard disk is much slower. This is why it is critical to have sufficient RAM.

I hope you found this information as interesting as I did. Thank you for reading.

On this website you can find more information on DIMM and also see photos: DIMM Explanation on www.tech-faq.com.

Sources:

• Video lectures
• http://www.tech-faq.com/dimm.html
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DDR2_SDRAM