Laptop Memory definition

[stanbesida]

Hi all you brainy A.B'ers, I am not very technically minded so would appreciate any advice you can give me.
I have been looking at some laptops and would like to know which is most important, the size of the hard drive or the size of the ram, as I say I am not very technically minded so I'm not sure what each of them do. I was looking at one with a 750gb hard drive and a 8gb ram but there is another with a 1tb hard drive and a 6gb ram. Could you also explain what the cache memory is as one of them has a 1tb hard drive, 3mb cache memory, and a 6gb ram

[deggers316]

more ram is best i doubt anyone actually needs 1tb h/d
ive got toshiba satellite 500gb h/d + 8gb ram and 2.20ghz processor

[ChuckFickens]

The hard drive is your computers storage and it's where all your files are kept when they are not being used, the contents of the hard drive are kept when the computer is off but hard drives are fairly slow, so the larger the hard drive the more information you can store (be that pictures, videos, documents, music.... whatever)

The RAM is what your computer uses for what it is working on at the time, so if you want to work on a document it's loaded from the hard drive into RAM so you can work on it and then when you click save any changes you've made are written back to the hard drive. so the more RAM you have the more things you can have open at the same time without it effecting the performance of the computer. RAM is very fast.

In theory the larger of either is better.... but realistically speaking... a 750GB hard drive is pretty large and 6GB of RAM is plenty for most people... so either would probably do you.

[stanbesida]

Thanks deggers316

[ChuckFickens]

Oh and cache memory can either be cache on the hard drive or cache on the CPU... 3MB is probably going to be the CPU cache (intel i3 CPU by any chance?)

The cache memory is a place for the CPU to store information that it might need quickly or is likely to be needed next. it's the fastest type of memory so having stuff cached and ready is a lot quicker than having to wait for it from normal RAM.... again the more cache the better.