Can you processor bottleneck your RAM?

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The computer I'm referring to is at my sig. And the reason I'm asking is because I originally had 1GB of RAM. I thought things were going kind of slow. So I bought more RAM. But I haven't really seen a difference. Additionally, as dumb as this may sound, I don't quite know what RAM is. I think of it as a "process accelerator when dealing with a lot of tasks" which is probably highly inaccurate. So can anyone give me a quick definition. Also, if I am right, is the reason that I don't see I difference because I don't stress my computer enough? Like, I can definitely tell it's faster when I have a lot of stuff going on.

edit: Sorry on the title, it was supposed to be "your" not "you".
 
well you don't need more ram than what you use. When doing nothing special (in win xp) you probably won't be using more than 200mb of ram. Then when you start doing a lot of different stuff (or just using a single program that needs a lot of ram, eg. games) that extra ram will make a difference.
 
Oh ok. Good. I got it for the right reasons like I suspected. Does it help with compiling a program? Since compiling is just send a lot of information, will that extra ram help out?
 
not sure, I think that's more about the cpu but I could be wrong. Just start compiling something and check the task manager to see how much ram it uses.
 
A lot of that information will be temporarily stored in the RAM by the CPU whilst it is doing other things.
 
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