Flu Shot of the week

[Dark_Angel13]

I look forward to it

[Xanders]

Take Your time

[Minkseru]

 

This week's will be broken up into two parts:

One for last week, and one for this week .

Alright without further ado, here is your Flu Shot of the Week:

We are going to in this discussion bring up what it is your RAM is and does for your computer.

So first a definition from webopedia:

RAM (pronounced ramm) is an acronym for random access memory, a type of computer memory that can be accessed randomly; that is, any byte of memory can be accessed without touching the preceding bytes. RAM is the most common type of memory found in computers and other devices, such as printers.

    That sadly is where everything stops being simple on explanations, so to sum up the rest of it.  RAM is broke up into SRAM (Static Random Access Memory) and DRAM (Dynamic Random Access Memory) in addition.  So let's explain what all this jumble means.

    Ram is what memory a program has to access, if a program is taking more memory than you have RAM the machine runs much slower.  if you have much more RAM then what programs are using your machine will run faster, but after a certain point the extra RAM becomes a waste of physical space, although personally I would rather be the little over on RAM than under .

    The difference between DRAM and SRAM are how they go about their method of working.  DRAM is like a leaky bucket, to make a binary 0 it stays empty, but to make a 1 on that spot it fills up the bucket with electrons, the problem is it keeps leaking out near the bottom so the electron faucet has to turn back on to refill.  This causes a constant refresh on the RAM, SRAM on the other hand is more stable with it's information, but at a much heavier cost from your wallet.  Where Sram will refresh a hundredth of the number of times as DRAM it does however have a heavier drain on power.
    Now on that note I guess the next question is where is RAM, RAM is in the sticks located in the four row that most mother boards have.  A little off of the cpu on most computers as well.
_______________________________
|          CPU chip          || || || ||-Ram| slots

    The sticks have two important bits of info on them.  One is physical size, but just as important is loading speed.   Without size the speed is useless to have, but if the speed is not fast enough to viably get the information quickly it does not matter how much RAM you have.
Who benefits from high RAM?
    Honestly the more RAM the more you can do at the same time, so multitaskers, hard core gamers with high end games that require lots of memory. People who do multiple or high end things of any kind can benefit from having a higher amount of RAM in the computer.
Well why can't I just run any RAM sticks I want?
    Motherboards have specific hardware that they will recognise, for example there are parts for MAC versus Windows, but more importantly RAM sticks have notches in them that designate where they fit in the slot, and not only that, but some cards are built for micro computers, laptops, Intel motherboards, and those are just a few examples.  If you have questions on what you can run look up your motherboards hardware support on google or the company site it is from.

This has been your Flu shot of the week:

Next edition how to install and run RAM for optimal results.
  Edited April 15, 2014 by Minkseru

[Dark_Angel13]

Nothing I didn't already know but very informative to say the least

[Minkseru]

 

Welcome to the Flu Shot of the Week.

Ok this is the second half of my topic on RAM.  A couple of things to cover that I did not cover the last time.  There are a few concepts not really covered when RAM comes up normally, and also RAM is not the only thing that affects the speed of your computer running.
Covering the first bit there is a term called Dual Channel RAM.  Basically the MOTHERBOARD sometimes supports the ability to run two seperate RAM cards at the same time for a list of tasks.  Borrowing from a couple of places on there wonderful example, it is basically like a line of runners.  Instead of the same runner running to the first tape, dropping the baton and picking it up again, there is a second runner ready to pick up the baton and keep going.  By having the two RAM cards lined up right the motherboard has it channeled so the CPU can assign an additional task to be ready for when the first is achieved.
Well does that mean all RAM cards are supported this way.  No, it means that two RAM cards that your motherboard will support are supported.  They also really need to be the same size of memory, and speed processing.  They can be different sizes but it will slow down the benefit of doing such a thing.  This is because in the electronic universe we for a rule of thumb DROP to the LOWEST of two items.  so if one is slower both will run at that speed.
So this obviously brings in that other components on your computer do a job on controlling how fast, and well your computer runs tasks.  The three big things are Motherboard, CPU, and RAM.  The CPU being the brains of your computer assigns what all your computer is allowed to do.  It tells the fans to run at a certain speed, the graphics card to run set graphics, and even your RAM what to "remember"  on "which".  The CPU's bonus to speed is telling your other machine parts what, how fast, and also in what order.  Think of one of those radio transmitters you might have used with your walkie talkies as a kid.  You could change who people were speaking to based on the channel you were set up to.  The better the processing power on your CPU chip, the quicker electric signals get assigned, and directed back out.  The Motherboard on the other hand determines what your machine will read.  If your motherboard does not recognise it rule of thumb is you might as well be trying to have your motherboard read the brick beside it.
So back to our earlier discussion on optimising your computers RAM for speed.  First make sure the Brand will work for your motherboard.  We have an INTEL board, it can run some AMD sticks, in addition to other things I am sure.  Next make sure the amount of RAM the card is giving EXCEEDs the amount of memory your computer will at a busy day use at the same time.  next check the max clock speed the cards will achieve, your card will perform at half that number.  This will be the number listed with the DDR in the case of our RIPJAW Ram stick it is a DDR3-1600.  The max transfer rate will be by the PCyyyy  in our case ours is PC3-12800.  So our RIP Jaw ramstick by itself will run at 800MHz, and transfer up to 12800MBs/Sec.
Next week we will discuss overclocking your computer, and why you would try it.
This has been your Flu Shot of the Week.

Edited April 15, 2014 by Minkseru

[Dark_Angel13]

I'm studying this stuff at my course right now and it takes teachers 3 hours to explain what you said just then lol, I think youd be able to explain it to them much better haha, I usually just sit there rubbing my face going "how can you be in a middle level IT course and not know the basics of this shit"

[lemmingllama]

I'm studying this stuff at my course right now and it takes teachers 3 hours to explain what you said just then lol, I think youd be able to explain it to them much better haha, I usually just sit there rubbing my face going "how can you be in a middle level IT course and not know the basics of this shit"

 

Hate to break it to you, but thats what most computer courses are like until you get into funky stuff like processor architecture or compilers. Or discrete math...... *Shudder*

 

@Minkseru        Great guides, keep up the good work!

[Dark_Angel13]

I'm studying this stuff at my course right now and it takes teachers 3 hours to explain what you said just then lol, I think youd be able to explain it to them much better haha, I usually just sit there rubbing my face going "how can you be in a middle level IT course and not know the basics of this shit"

 

Hate to break it to you, but thats what most computer courses are like until you get into funky stuff like processor architecture or compilers. Or discrete math...... *Shudder*

 

Yeah I know they are, I'm only doing this shit right now to move onto something higher, need the certificate from this thing to get a job

[Xanders]

Haha the teachers are just doing their best based on their experience

Can' wait for next week's topic

[Minkseru]

Will have to make sure that gets up soon .  Wife is prodding me to get a few of these set up to be ready to go.  Goal is to have it Wednesday Morning.

[Dark_Angel13]

I look forward to seeing more of them

[Minkseru]

Haha the teachers are just doing their best based on their experience

Can' wait for next week's topic

If you can't explain it simply, you don't understand it well enough.

Albert Einstein

 

Probably my favorite quote from him .  I will not always be able to explain it simply, but I will do my absolute best to study the material until I can .

[Dark_Angel13]

Haha the teachers are just doing their best based on their experience

Can' wait for next week's topic

If you can't explain it simply, you don't understand it well enough.

Albert Einstein

 

Probably my favorite quote from him .  I will not always be able to explain it simply, but I will do my absolute best to study the material until I can .

 

Thankyou! I fully agree, glad I'm on holidays away from teachers

[Minkseru]

 

    Welcome to your Flu Shot of the Week, this week we are going to be discussing of all odd things, uninstalling programs.  For some of you this week is going to seem like a walk down repeat lane.  The reason however we are discussing this is that it occured to me that there are probably people out there who 1)  Have no idea how to uninstall programs, or 2)  May need help uninstalling a persistent program.

    Ok first off let me explain the difference between removing a program, and uninstalling a program.  When you remove a program from your computer, we will take for instance Guild Wars, you are removing the executable file, or some people delete the whole folder, well that is groovy and all; but you have not actually removed the program from your computer.  Just some files.  What does that matter you are asking I bet.  Well in the case of Guild Wars when you remove the Guild Wars Folder, without actually uninstalling the program, you now have a unfixable file.  I had to go back, and uninstall and reinstall my Guild Wars when my dad removed it when I was back in highschool,  I could not download a new expansion, reinstall the original game.  Nothing.

    When you uninstall the program it removes the executable files, the folder, the files associated with just that program, and more importantly kills the association to the program.  If at a later point you reinstall the program well it is easily done.

So on to actually uninstall a program.  Now for some of you this may seem a bit backwards so I will give a few routes to the same goal.

-.)  The Standard Windows unstill method:

    Go to Start, Control Panel, Programs, Uninstall a program; sometimes called add/remove program.  Select the program you are wishing to uninstall right click or hit enter depending, and it will run the programs uninstaller to uninstall the program.

--.) From the program file itself:

    Now you may not have your file in the C:/ Drive but we will pretend you do.  In my case we will go to:

    C:/Program Files/Random Program/Backdoor Folder/Actual Program/

in here we have AP uninstall

this file will be the one that uninstalls the program.

---.)  From a program that helps with uninstalls:

There are some programs, CCleaner, Revouninstaller Pro to name a few, That will have tools that bring up the full list of programs on your computer available to be uninstalled.  These are very much self explanatory, some nifty features are also removes program from program list, which does not remove the program just the name from the list .

    ---        ---        ---        ---        ---        ---

The programs listed will also help when you have virus ridden programs that are having an issue being removed.  Thank you for your time and bearing with this week

This has been your Flu Shot of the Week!

Edited April 15, 2014 by Minkseru

[Dark_Angel13]

Good one this week man, I knew it already lol but still always good to recap on things like it and it is a lot of help to ppl who dont know it so on behalf of the forums I thank you for your help =)

[Minkseru]

It is actually something I have had to explain in real life a number of times >.<  >.>

[Dark_Angel13]

It is actually something I have had to explain in real life a number of times >.<  >.>

 

Me too, I'm my families personal helpdesk lol, it's so hard to explain it over the phone sometimes when they don't know anything lol

[Minkseru]

Some of this is on the concept of explaining how to make a peanut butter and jelly sandwich

[Minkseru]

 

Welcome to your Flu shot of the week

Ok I personally find this is a topic I need to do more often myself, and collecting more information I found some really cool things out too .
This week we are going to explain defragmenting your computer.  This is a process that people frequently forget to do, and often times we never really get an explantion as to "why" this needs to happen.
So first off Defragmentation, or "Defragging" is done because when your computer keeps files and you pulls other files up, every now and again your computer fragmetns programs down with age, and when your computer goes to pull the information to open persay Windows it may be in five different spots on your "Harddrive".  This makes your computer work harder, and run slower.
So when we Defrag our computer it collects the various pieces of files, and programs to put them all together in one place, leaving all your empty space as a large chunk.  Think if you will when you played legos, and other such jigsaw construction toys, that you could put legos all over the yard block, but then it was hard to place down new legos on the bottom, well when all the legos are pushed into one side you can fit much larger, or odder shaped legos in one space.
This is said to help the life of your Harddrive, and other various pieces.  Defragmenting does get easier and easier with each cleaning, but the first one generally takes about 24+ hours.  
Now  almost every OS comes with a way to defrag.  In windows you can go to system tools, and go to Defrag your hardrive, Click the drive you wish to defrag, and tell it to go to properties, under there you can defrag, also under command prompt you can defrag.
Best of luck, and free to take all questions,
This has been your Flu Shot of the Week.

Edited April 15, 2014 by Minkseru

[Dark_Angel13]

Good stuff again Mink