What is virtual memory and how is it different than RAM?
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RAM is an acronym for Random Access Memory. This is a region on a computer that has several pins that can have voltages on them (8GB or RAM means there are 2^26 of those pins) data has to be loaded into RAM before you can run an operation on it. Loading data from the hard drive into RAM is very slow compared to how quickly the operations run.
Data is constantly being loaded into RAM as the computer runs its programs, but sometimes, a piece of data will need to be in RAM (because it needs to be in RAM to be used at all) but it doesn’t get used often, so it doesn’t need to be sitting ready in RAM because speed isn’t that important for this piece of data. Instead of properly saving it to the hard drive in a space reserved for the relevant software to be accessed later, it gets saved to a specific region of the hard drive called the virtual memory. When that piece of data needs to be loaded back into RAM, it is copied from the virtual memory, and whatever operation needs to be run can be. This still saves time because instead of having to search through the hard drive for the right location every time, it can search the region set aside for virtual memory, while leaving a safe region where that data can’t be overwritten.
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