Novice trying to understand 1 gb

Novice here trying to understand 1 GB. I bought a Dell, currently in production, that has 1 GB "dual channel DDR2 SDRAM" memory for about $1600. I see a HP in the paper today that states 250 GB hard drive. I thought the 1 GB was this massive amount of hard drive to be proud of. Am I understanding correctly the HP for $600 less has 250 times the hard drive of my new computer?

 

The 1GB is the RAM size, not the Hard disk space. RAM goes 8,16,32,64,128,256,512,1024 and so on. These are two different things. Besides if a computer had 250GB of RAM, it would be one hell of a large RAM chip and today's current OS's would not be able to utilize it efectively (there are some out there that can, but are used for SuperComputers).

 

hello, i,m new to this also, just regestered, and i can't seem to figure out how to ask the 'geeks' tech. questions. if someone can show me the way i would greatly appreciate it. p.s. what is a 'thread" thanks

 

This is a thread, as in a topic.

If you have a question, start a new thread in the correct forum (top left of each forum, click New Thread). This is the Hardware section.

 

That is not the same as your hard drive space. RAM is where your computer stores any programs that are running. To run a program though you first must store it on your HDD then it gets read from the HDD into the RAM when you run it.

 

Thanks to all. You mentioned RAM ranges 8,16,32,64,128,256,512,1024. Where does the 1 GB I have fall into this range?
Also, is there a big difference between 160 Hard drive and say a 260 hard drive? (I plan on using the computer to burn DVD's, CD's, etc, email, and word processing.) Would you imagine the typical new Dell that has 160 GB Hard Drive would easily be upgradable to 260ish?

 

a 160GB hard drive is plenty for most people, it will hold hundreds of Cds full of music and data.

 

1GB falls within the 1024 Mbytes.

1024 Megabytes = 1.024 Gigabyte, or simply 1 Gigabyte.

Hence why a 160 gigabyte is actually 163840 Megabytes. Easier on the human mind to read 160 GB, then 163.840 GB.

 

Your 1 GB of ram is actually just a bit more than 1 GB. It's 24 megs more. Since you have 2 512 sticks of RAM you actually have 1024 megs of RAM. It's only called one gig of RAM for convience when in actuality it's 1 gig and 24 megs!! Hope I didn't confuse you more, but that's about the best way to describe it. BTW, welcome to MG!!!!!

 

If you're buying a hard drive, get the biggest one you can afford, within reason off-course.


They can be also used for a lot of things like turning into an external drive or using it in the next upgrade etc.