How to Choose the Right Amount of RAM for Your New Computer

Video Transcript

"Hi, I'm Chris Bryce from superservice.com. I'd like to talk to you about how to choose the right amount of RAM for your computer. When you're buying a new computer and you're trying to customize the amount of RAM that's in it, there's a couple of different things to consider. RAM is what allows you to access the processing power of the computer. But one of the biggest things to keep in mind is that no matter how much RAM you have, all of the information at some point is going to have to be displayed on your screen. The thing that does that is your video card. So you want to make sure that you match up the right amount of RAM in your system with the amount of RAM on your video card. If you've got a good quality video card that's at least 128 to 256 megabytes of RAM, then you can pair that with the amount of RAM on your computer. When you choose the amount of RAM on your computer, you want to make sure that its enough to access the information that you're accessing, but also to allow you to do multitasking. One gigabyte of RAM might be OK if you're operating one or two programs at a time, but if you're opening any kind of picture editing files or having several files open at a time, for instance if you're browsing the Internet but you have your pictures that you've taken off of your digital camera or cellular phone and you're editing those while you're on the Internet and you're sending e-mails, you've got a few programs up and you're going to want to have more RAM on your computer. I would recommend personally doing at least 2 gigabytes of RAM no matter what your needs are. Most of today's computers are going to come with at least one gigabyte and I would suggest adding to that very shortly after getting your computer. And then you can go from there as far as upgrading in the future to 3 gigs or 4 gigs or whatever might be needed in the future. The next step though is, once you look at that RAM on your computer and everything is working great, if you want to get more performance out of your system and you already got 2 to 3 gigabytes of RAM, then I would take a look at that video card. But that's how I would choose the amount of RAM that goes into your computer."