Questions about RAM

[Cheecho]

Hello, I'm a newly registered member. Some real quick back story I guess.

I love computers, and have been gaming on them for awhile now. Have no fear of building them/tearing them apart, but sadly admit I really don't know too much about the tech behind them. Just very basic ideas. I decided to change this and enrolled in college for IT services. Yet I REALLY want to know what I'm talking about in the future, so I figured I'd join a forum.

I believe this is the right spot for posting about education questions.. So in my chapter we're working on in class it talks a lot about RAM (I'm in my first semester btw so we're not too deep in anything), and I think I have the general idea of it. It's a kind of "waiting room" for processing/program instructions/instructions from your OS that control basic PC functions.

It says it holds all this information in charged capacitors that each hold a byte of data. Now my first question is if you have 8GB of RAM does that mean there are roughly 8 billion capacitors added up from all the stick of RAM you have in ?

Now, on to my second question. Since RAM is volatile and only stores data when charged by electricity when connection is cut everything stored in RAM is lost. Well, say I'm working on a Word document and have some of it saved the saved file is on my hard drive right? Now, If I make changes to this document and don't save my work as power goes out was the opened document being held in the RAM since I lose everything I changed?

I know that some my just ask why I'm not asking my professor about such things. He really encourages us to teach ourselves, and go out to explore for answers. I've never really been a fan of this style of teaching, but I cannot deny that it has worked for me in the past ha ha.

 

[carnageX]

I believe this is the right spot for posting about education questions.. So in my chapter we're working on in class it talks a lot about RAM (I'm in my first semester btw so we're not too deep in anything), and I think I have the general idea of it. It's a kind of "waiting room" for processing/program instructions/instructions from your OS that control basic PC functions.

It's not just a "waiting room" for programs, it's more of a way for the computer to do work, store temporary data used by programs (variables and such), etc.

It says it holds all this information in charged capacitors that each hold a byte of data. Now my first question is if you have 8GB of RAM does that mean there are roughly 8 billion capacitors added up from all the stick of RAM you have in ?

Capacitors? Not quite. They have flash chips on them basically. A lot of smaller capacity flash chips that is (that's what all of those black things are on RAM modules).

Now, on to my second question. Since RAM is volatile and only stores data when charged by electricity when connection is cut everything stored in RAM is lost. Well, say I'm working on a Word document and have some of it saved the saved file is on my hard drive right? Now, If I make changes to this document and don't save my work as power goes out was the opened document being held in the RAM since I lose everything I changed?

Correct. It allocated space in memory for the computer to work on it, and could also allocate a temporary "workspace" on the hard drive. However...newer versions of MS Word have an 'auto-save' feature that saves to a temporary file intermittently (depending on what time you set the auto-save to trigger, will trigger every X minutes) to the HDD. Been around since Office 2007, I believe.

 

[Cheecho]

Thanks for clearing up the capacitors issue Carnage!

I'm glad I had a bit of a general understanding on it. I'm still in the "intro" class for the major so he says, at the moment, we're really just breezing over everything and will delve deeper in later classes.