Layman's Terms Please

Any other tech-related topics
Post Reply
Message
Author
spaztastic
Posts: 77
Joined: Mon Mar 03, 2008 6:29 pm

Layman's Terms Please

#1 Post by spaztastic »

When you try to explain how something in a computer works, or how it speeds up/slows down their computer, how do you explain it to them? Of course, I'm sure we use Layman's Terms but how do you go about doing it? Here is how I explain what RAM is, what it is used for, how a computer gets fragmented and how defragmenting it makes it faster:

"RAM is used when you open a program. Think of that program as a stack of papers and think of the RAM as a desk. If you have a lot of paper and not much room on your desk, it takes awhile for you to go through all those papers. Now if the desk were bigger, you could process those files a lot faster. That is why getting more RAM is a good idea and that is a simple way of explaining the benefits of it to you."

"When you install a program or save a picture to your computer, it is stored on the hard drive. The computer just puts the file wherever it will fit. Think of the hard drive as a filing cabinet and think of the program as a stack of papers. When you go to get a project out of the cabinet, you want all the files together so that you can piece them together faster. Well on a hard drive, it doesn't keep things nice and tidy. Defragmenting the computer takes all the information about each program and puts them all together so that the program will load faster, due to less time wasted looking for files, and run more efficiently."

Darkbee
Posts: 291
Joined: Mon Feb 06, 2006 8:35 am
Contact:

#2 Post by Darkbee »

I think the Post Office mail box analogy works quite well. You start with a wall of of mailboxes, all empty and each mailbox has it's own number. As you need to store information you begin to fill mailboxes, keeping track of which mailbox number stores what information. When you need to retrieve a certain piece of information you look up which mailbox number you need. If all your mailboxes are full you can't store any information. You can remove information from a mailbox to be able to reuse that mailbox to store something else.

There are other more complicated issues such as what happens if a mailbox becomes full but you still have more related information you have to store, so you have to move on to a new mailbox (possibly physically adjacent to the first mailbox or not). This explains fragmentation. Furthermore, if related mailboxes are no longer physically next to each other then it takes longer to find all the related mailboxes and retrieve the information from all of them. (why fragmentation effects performance)

It's a pretty crude view but it alludes to the idea of memory addressing and random access memory. In addition the same principle applies equally to disks, which are also just blocks of information. How the information is stored, or even what the information stored is, is irrelevant.

Usually I find it best with most every day users to NOT go try to explain it in the first place, overly simplify it or just plain lie. Something like "The more information your computer has to store the slower it will become, end of story." usually will do. :)

I find users often get confused by RAM versus disk space and often use the two interchangeably ("My computer has 250GB of memory"... erm, no I don't think it does!).

Post Reply