How much memory do I have?
Kevin J. Cummings
cummings at kjchome.homeip.net
Tue Sep 22 01:13:22 UTC 2009
On 09/21/2009 06:06 PM, Hiisi wrote:
> Original Poster, sorry for intruding the thread, but I have small
> question to ask for those Gurus.
> How much memory can I have on my computer? It's 32 bit desktop:
It depends on a lot of things, but mostly your system motherboard.
Different boards allocate their memory differently. Especially with
32-bit only CPUs.
> Linux imt.ru 2.6.30.5-43.fc11.i586 #1 SMP Thu Aug 27 21:18:54 EDT 2009
> i686 i686 i386 GNU/Linux
> Memory section of lshw says:
> *-memory
> description: System Memory
> physical id: 19
> slot: System board or motherboard
> size: 512MiB
> capacity: 2GiB
>
> If I understand that correctly I'm not allowed to add more that 2GiB?
That's what the above seems to indicate for your motherboard.
> Using PAE kernel will I be able to install 4Gib?
No, if the motherboard isn't capable of handling more than 2GiB, then
that's your max. My laptop has a max of 2GiB as well. And its running
an Intel Core2 CPU which is 64-bits. But, it can't use more than 2GiB
of RAM.
> Thanks for attention!
Each mother board has its own restrictions. It should be in the User
Guide for either your system (if its a brand name system) or your mother
board. I have found the site: www.crucial.com is a good repository
for amounts of MAX memory (they tell you what the max amounts are if you
can tell them the system/motherboard brand and model number.
I have had computers with max motherboard amounts of: 384MiB, 512MiB,
1GiB, 2GiB, 4GiB*, and I've seen systems with max amounts of 8GiB,
16GiB, and more.
I put a "*" next to the 4GiB amount because sometimes motherboard
designs limit the actual amount of available memory to 3GiB or 3.5GiB
due to memory mappings (esp with 32-bit CPUs), and most 32-bit OSes
can't use more than 4GiB max anyways.
Also, sometimes, the CMOS Setup has a setting controlling how much
memory is made available to the OS.
PAE (Physical Address Extensions) can be used with most modern
CPUs (when run in 32-bit mode), but since most modern CPUs are 64-bit
capable, why would you run a 32-bit OS on them? Even Windows is now
shipping 64-bit Vista and Windows-7 on new processors. The default
kernels for Fedora 11 are PAE capable, so if your motherboard can
see/use more than 3GiB, you should get use of the max amount of memory.
I've read a couple of good explanations online about the limits of
memory on 32-bit motherboards. Google for them, they're pretty easy to
find.
--
Kevin J. Cummings
kjchome at rcn.com
cummings at kjchome.homeip.net
cummings at kjc386.framingham.ma.us
Registered Linux User #1232 (http://counter.li.org)
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