There was a thread not too long ago about computer memory; I haven't bothered to try to dig it up; it was just a long rambling discussion about error detection and stuff.
Well, this is a long ramble - maybe I should have signed it as "The Plainclothes Hippie", as I'm quite euphoriated, herbically, of course. A little alcohol can be quite synergistic with the herb, of course.
But that notwithstanding, I have an [possibly] interesting phenomenon to report here about computer memory. I have a pentium of some kind - oh, dangit! There's Rich The Pedant... $ cat /proc/cpuinfo processor : 0 vendor_id : AuthenticAMD cpu family : 6 model : 4 model name : AMD Athlon(tm) Processor stepping : 4 cpu MHz : 996.479 cache size : 256 KB fdiv_bug : no hlt_bug : no f00f_bug : no coma_bug : no fpu : yes fpu_exception : yes cpuid level : 1 wp : yes flags : fpu vme de pse tsc msr pae mce cx8 sep mtrr pge mca cmov pat pse36 mmx fxsrsyscall mmxext 3dnowext 3dnow bogomips : 1985.74
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Oh, OK, it's an Athlon! Kewl!
Anyways, I was having no end of problems with Windoze - I've got my firewall configured so that the Windoze (W2K, actually) box can't even communicate with the internet - only the Samba server.
And I kept thinking, "What's getting through, breaking my system?"
And the one really, really annoying thing was that MDT6 (AutoCAD Mechanical Desktop, version 6 [la-dih-dah]) kept breaking. I'd have to reinstall, and it'd be good for one run. Then break.
But, I had set that aside for when I want to bother to take notes and go seek out answers and all that crap - what I have is "good enough" for now.
So, given that.
I was sitting musing about this memory stuff, and I remembered that I have a couple of memory sticks on my shelf - long story short, one of them is the same edge connector (3 bays - short, medium, long) as the one that's in this computer, so why am I not using it?
So I pull out the 256M stick, and plug in this other stick, boot up to Linux, and free reports about 56 MB of memory. Oh! Suddenly I remember why I had left it on the shelf. But, WTF, I think to myself - why not, now that that one's working, just slap in the other one and see what happens?
So I did. It booted, free in Linux reported >310MB (don't remember the exact ... goddammit! $ free total used free shared buffers cached Mem: 312844 189672 123172 0 8780 33340
-/+ buffers/cache: 147552 165292 Swap: 1493960 236600 1257360 richgrise@thunderbird:~ $
----------------- OK, 312844. How much more than 262,144 is that? I'm too lazy.
But, I haven't noticed any performance diffences in Linux, but over in Doze-land, MDT6 hasn't died on startup since I installed the new 56M or whatever it is. 48M? 49152? Whatever.
I accidentally fixed something that I didn't even know that that was what would fix it.
Hope I don't dislocate my shoulder patting myself on the back. ;-D
Cheers! Rich