Monday, April 12, 2010

Tips when adding extra memory to your laptop

I recently got a new Lenovo T500 that had 2G RAM into it. I installed 32-bit Fedora 12 on it which worked flawlessly, even dual monitor. Then I got an extra 2G RAM which meant that I needed to open laptop case to install it. It gave me some jitters given that I have not unscrewed any laptop before. The last time I did something close to this was way back in 2000 when I put extra hard disk into my Dell Desktop to have dual boot with Windows ME and Red Hat Linux 6. Fedora was not born then.

I followed T500 hardware maintenance manual at http://download.lenovo.com/ibmdl/pub/pc/pccbbs/mobiles_pdf/43y6630_04.pdf, rushed to Radioshack to get screw driver for 14 mm screws and with some fiddling, snapped the thing in its slot. Reboot and

[prabhat@eejot ~]$ more /proc/meminfo
MemTotal: 3057360 kB
MemFree: 2192648 kB
Buffers: 45864 kB

What? Should not MemTotal be somewhere close to 4194304 kB? Then I come to know about PAE, did a 'sudo yum install kernel-PAE', reboot and Voila. Now I see

[prabhat@eejot ~]$ more /proc/meminfo
MemTotal: 4013920 kB
MemFree: 2397700 kB

which looks much better. Thanks Matt for pointers. :-)

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