When a file is stored in clusters that are not physically located next to each other on the platter, it is fragmented. Fragment can occur for various reasons, but most common cause is the modification of deletion of a file. To explain it generally is that there are three files. First one takes three spaces and the second and third takes two spaces. We remove the second one and replace with a five space file. Since all five can’t fit within the two spaces, we put two into the space and put the rest at the end. This is called fragmentation.
Fragmentation can affect all files, including system files. As a result fragmentation will affect all window system. As a normal user, the hard drives will fragment over time and activities such as updates or installation and deletion of programs can cause major fragmentation. It will cause the performance to degrade over time.
The different processes running in the background i.e. window explorer, all take an allotted amount of RAM to perform at optimum levels. More free RAM means that the essential processes that are running have more priority of the space and the CPU. When you begin to run your RAM to its limits, the essential processes and even the non-essential processes begin to lag due to the overtaxing of the CPU and RAM.
Technically RAM does not have any influence on the processor performance, but it does have an influence on how much processes or technically instructions that processor can read. So a greater amount of RAM memory means that more instructions fit into that memory and therefore, bigger programs can be loaded at once. Allowing the operating system to work with a multitasking concept, where we can run multiple programs at once. To explain how it works, you have 128MB of RAM on your computer and you would have slowness as it has to load a piece of that program, then it has to refresh, then load up the rest of the program. Thus you will fees a slowness when loading a big program.
There are many factors that affect performance on a computer, one that we talk about is the fragmentation of the files system that is often ignored because some people think that it doesn’t change much performance for the normal user. To other factors is whether or not add more memory to the motherboard, which depends on how the computer is used, but adding more memory will certainly add performance to the computer if required.