"I tried to download $BIGFILE, but it said my memory was full."

The first time I encountered something like that confused me. I then realized the person was talking about disk space! Since then, I've found it annoying everytime I hear it. You?

-Chris

Try explaining the concept of a swapfile to said user :>

explaning swap space is easy

kinda

i use an office analergy for most fo my explaining

disk space is like the filing cabneit most stuff is stored there
memory is like desk space, the bigger the desk the more stuff u can have on it

and swap.. well swap is like a papertray on the desk, u pust stuff in their when ur not needing it on ur desk but need quick acess to it

seems to work for most people

Love your analogy.

It always drives me nuts when people told me they dont' know if their "40GB memories" are large enough to run programs, or their hard disks are too small to "run too many programs "....

Though I tried to give a more academic explanation of the difference between "main memory" and "secondary memory", usually I failed..

Yes! This is particularly confusing when you're dealing with people using older Mac (OS 9 or earlier) clients, as "out of memory" errors are common on those dogs, but then again, their hard drives are all full up most of the time as well.

On the subject of hard drives, how many of you are fed up with people who point to the monitor and say "the computer" while they refer to their computer as "the hard drive?" If you scaled that up and wrapped a computer around that "hard drive" we'd be back in the day of basement-sized computers...

Hear, hear.

My dad once asked me to take his old computer to a repair shop (don't remember why anymore, it was some time ago), and told me to go "pick up the hard drive" (his words). I though it would be a small task if he had actually bothered to detach the hard drive from the rest of the computer, so I walked over to his house and didn't think much of it. I should've guessed it, though, since I know he's not exactly what you'd call a "computer person" (he knows his way around the software he uses on a daily basis, but that's about it). I had to carry a desktop computer half-way across town. From then on, I've had to continuously correct him every time he talks about the "hard drive" ("the hard drive is a small component inside that big box, ffs!").

In 30 years I've never heard memory split like this before, no wonder.

My 22 year old copy of Deitel's 'An Introduction to Operating Systems' makes this distinction repeatedly, with examples drawn from such hot new systems as VM, MVS and VAX/VMS.

Let's go back to calling them Winchester disks and really confuse the non-technicals.

_________________
/ Peter

Haha, someone at my office did this today, then quickly caught himself

As far as explaining swap space, I've two words for you:
Pretend memory.

Best client call ever:

I called Time Warner and they told me that I don't have enough memory in my modems and that I can't use their cable internet! Can you come put more memory in my modems?!

Yes... When they stress they think their "memory" is not enough to run programs and they want to have bigger hard drives... Or removing some programs from the hard drive so the "memory" can be spared to run some programs more faster...

Well..back in school... though storage is secondary memory in class, this still drives me nuts.. I had to explain in layman's terms...

.... I worked as a computer repair guy for a while. I only met one person that couldn't "get it." The way some people have no understanding of computers in any way what-so-ever really scares me.

On a different but related note, one of my biggest pet peeves when it comes to computing nomenclature is people describing the Internet as an object they personally possess ("I have the Internet on my cellphone", "My Internet is really slow").