RAM explanation / verbiage for customers

RAM explanation / verbiage for customers

Introduction

This verbiage is primarily for managed services customers who receive reports and may ask about the amount of RAM in their computers. But it can be edited to serve as a general purpose explanation. It's important for non-technical personnel to understand that RAM (or memory) doesn't accumulate data over time the way a hard drive does. It's constantly being written and cleared as you open and close programs, and it resets completely every time you reboot. So it can never be "full" in the permanent sense.

A hard drive or SSD, on the other hand, genuinely fills up over time as you save files, install programs, and accumulate data. When a computer struggles because it doesn't have enough RAM, the accurate way to describe it is to say it has "inadequate memory capacity" — meaning the computer simply wasn't built with enough RAM to comfortably handle what's being asked of it, which is a design or purchasing decision, not a symptom of the memory being "used up."

Suggested Verbiage

Hi xxx, 

Thank you for your message. RAM is a hardware component in the computer that essentially acts as short-term memory while the computer is performing tasks. As such, it's not something your users can upgrade. It would require a technician to visit to perform the installation. 

Generally, our reports will flag any computers with less than 8GB of RAM. This is a minimum baseline for good performance. However, users who open a lot of programs (especially large spread sheets, video editing software, and/or multiple browser windows) may find that even 8GB is not enough and their computers seem sluggish at times. 

Conversely,  if a user is not experiencing slowness or lag time, then they are probably fine with the amount of RAM they have, even if our report says it's less than the ideal amount. 

I would suggest that you ask your team if they are experiencing any slowness. If so, please report back to us on which ones have this problem, and we will investigate the option of adding more RAM to each of those computers. It would require a visit to install the component. but it should not take very long. RAM is generally not expensive either. 

Please note that RAM (sometimes called "memory") is completely different from disk space, which is the permanent storage on your computer's hard drive. Here's a more detailed explanation of RAM, in case you're interested: https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/tech-tips-and-tricks/computer-ram.html 



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