What can happen if you exceed your system's RAM capacity?

When a system exceeds its RAM capacity, it typically starts to use a swap file or paging file on the hard drive. This process, known as "paging," allows the operating system to free up RAM by moving some data to the hard drive, which is significantly slower than RAM. As a result, the overall performance of the system may decrease, leading to noticeable slowdowns, especially during resource-intensive tasks.

This behavior is more pronounced when running multiple applications or processes that demand more memory than what is physically available. While the system may not crash immediately or fail to boot, users will experience diminished performance as the system relies on the slower hard drive storage, which can lead to increased latency and longer load times.

Therefore, when RAM capacity is exceeded, the most common outcome is a slowdown in performance due to reliance on hard drive space for additional memory needs.