Re: RAM

[RedEyes]

Hey everyone -- I dual boot from an AMD K62/450. I have been running with 64M of ram for the past year or so (believe it or not!) And, due to an INCREDIBLE sale at Best Buy, I upgraded my machine to 256M of RAM.

What a disappointment! I expected a much better performance boost. Since I can't afford a new computer, I figured $30 for 256M was the next best thing.

I didn't expect lightning fast speed, but I did expect certain apps to load faster, and did expect less disk caching... But it seems that there is just as much disk grinding as there was before.. Is there a setting (in either OS) that I need to set to take advantage of this huge difference in memory?

*As a side note, Windows' swap file is STILL 77 megs, even though the physical ram is only 40% utilized (according to Norton Diags)! Arg!

[z0mbix]

Use cat /proc/meminfo to tell whether your RAM is being recognised. You could try putting:

append="mem=256M"

In you /etc/lilo.conf and then re-run /sbin/lilo.

I recently went from 64MB to 256MB with my PIII 450MHz and this has greatly increased performance :D

[ 30 November 2001: Message edited by: cheeky_zombie ]

[mrBen]

Cheeky's right - adding the line to LILO (or as a parameter in GRUB if you use that) should greatly improve things. I did exactly the same - 32Mb to 256Mb on a Cyrix 300 chip, and things fly.

[Icarus]

More memory will not make apps load any faster (need a faster HD for that, on the most part). More memory WILL help in reducing disk writes to the swap file and in general.

[DMR]

And speaking of disk performance, you can increase that considerably by following the instructions in the Hrard Drive Tweaks NHF (http://www.linuxnewbie.org/nhf/intel/hardware/hdtweak.html). Do it now if you haven't already.
:)