If you use your computer for accounting or you work with large data bases, you should consider a hard disk drive. A hard disk drive can store the equivalent of dozens of 3.5-inch disks. It's a fast and convenient way to get at your data. The hard disk stores your data on platters permanently sealed inside a plastic case. Besides storing documents on a hard disk, you can store applications on it and switch between applications without swapping disks.

A memory expansion card adds from 256K to 1 megabyte of RAM to your Apple IIGS. By installing a memory expansion card in your Apple IIGS, you can take advantage of applications that require more memory because of their use of graphics and other memory gobbling features.

Many applications designed especially for the Apple IIGS will use the extra memory on the card automatically—as an extension of the memory that's built into the computer. You don't need to know anything special to use the card in this way; just install it and leave the rest up to the application.

For applications that don't take advantage of the memory on the card automatically, you can use the Control Panel to designate some or all of the memory on the card as a RAM disk—memory that you access like a disk. The advantage of using the card as a RAM disk is that when you copy an application to the RAM disk and run it from there, the computer can access different parts of the application much more quickly than it can when the application is on a regular disk.

Memory expansion card

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