I have an HP Envy desktop, circa 2012 vintage, that I purchased with 12GB of RAM. I am pretty sure that it has one bank (or card, or whatever you call it) of 8GB and another bank of 4GB. I would like to upgrade it to 16GB of RAM, the most that this particular computer will hold.
Questions:
1) Would it be better to remove all of the existing RAM, and replace it with 16GB of brand-new RAM?
2) Or would I be okay with removing the 4GB card, and replacing it with a new 8GB card, leaving the existing 8GB card "as is"?
3) Can RAM ever get "full", I don't mean in an individual session --- I know that can and does happen --- but does repeated use of the same RAM cards leave any kind of cookies, artifacts, junk files, or whatever, sitting there in the RAM, or does the RAM purge back to zero when you reboot the computer? IOW, whenever you power the computer down and back up, does that "wipe the slate clean" as regards RAM, and do you then have 12GB (or 16GB) of "fresh" RAM, as pristine as it was the day it was installed?
4) And can RAM cards ever get corrupted, so that their performance is either diminished, or entirely gutted?
Please pardon me if I'm not using the precise technical terms, my meaning should be clear from what I've described.
Thanks in advance for any direction anybody can give me.