Slightly different memory question
Karl F. Larsen
klarsen1 at gmail.com
Wed Jan 7 15:25:46 UTC 2009
Mark Haney wrote:
> Scott wrote:
>
>> Hi,
>>
>> I have a Inspiron 1525 with 4GB of Ram and I noticed through system
>> monitor that the 32-bit Ubuntu sees 3.5GB of that. I know my video card
>> uses 256MB, so does this mean that I am using a total of 3.75GB or is
>> that 256MB included in the 3.5GB listed?
>>
>> This question is important to me as I am trying to decide if I should
>> move to a 64-bit system or not. Losing 500MB bugs me a little more than
>> loosing 256MB.
>>
>>
>>
>
> That depends, does your video card use shared video memory? You can
> find that in the BIOS as normally you can adjust that down if you need
> to conserve RAM for non-video needs.
>
> A lot of laptops do that, but I don't know that all of them do. Mine
> does not, but yours might be different.
>
> If it's NOT shared memory, then you're only seeing 3.5GB on the 32bit
> system. However, I'd be willing to bet that you ARE using shared memory,
> as typically a 32-bit system sees 3.7 to 3.8GB of RAM our of 4GB.
>
>
>
>
All this memory problems make me VERY happy I have just 2 GB of RAM
in all my computers. I did this with the help of "top". I checked my
computer with 500 MB of RAM and it was using the swap file a lot! Slowed
down performance. Then I got 1 GB and that was lots better but the swap
file was still being used a little. So I upgraded to 2 GB and now the
swap file does not need to be there. It is ever used with 2 GB of RAM.
So why have 4 GB??
Karl
--
Karl F. Larsen, AKA K5DI
Linux User
#450462 http://counter.li.org.
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