Guide to PC networks: Random Access Memory or RAM
Memory and hard disk space are often confused. Imagine the PC is an office with a filing cabinet. The filing cabinet contains all the files and tools you need to work. In order to work, you take a document or two out of the cabinet and a calculator from the bottom drawer, and place them on your desk. While the documents and tools are on your desk, you can use them.The hard disk is like the filing cabinet - it stores your work, but you can't work in it. The memory is like your desk - you can work on it but it's too small to store everything on all the time. When you leave your office (the PC), anything left on your desk (open in memory) and not put back in the filing cabinet (saved to disk) will disappear.
1 byte = 8 bits, where a bit is the smallest unit of computer
processing.
1 kilobyte (KB) = 1,024 bytes
1 megabyte (MB) = 1,048,576 bytes
1 gigabyte (GB) = 1,073,741,824 bytes
PCs in the PC suite have up to 1GB RAM and up to 160GB hard disks.
Random access memory From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia