Michael – Wow, I’m glad Mark thought to check the max memory for the computer! (Thanks, Mark!) So, what Mark said. The only thing I’d add is to modify ‘get the fastest memory you can afford’ to something like ‘get as much memory as your computer can hold, as fast as possible’. There is a tradeoff here – if you have enough memory to keep your computer from swapping/paging/whatever-ing to and from disk then speed of ram matters. If, however, you don’t have enough memory to keep the majority of ‘active’ programs in memory so you don’t need to go read them from the disk before they can run – well, then faster is better for those things in memory, but as soon as the disk transfer gets slower than the execution speed your faster ram is useless. Or at least doesn’t help as much as it should. IMHO, of course ;-) From: plug-discuss-bounces@lists.phxlinux.org [mailto:plug-discuss-bounces@lists.phxlinux.org] On Behalf Of Mark Phillips Sent: Thursday, October 09, 2014 7:36 AM To: Main PLUG discussion list Subject: Re: memory Michael, It seems the max memory is 4GB for that system - 4 banks of 1 GB sticks. RAM memory Capacity - 4 GB Memory Type - DDR2 SDRAM - DIMM 240-pin Data Integrity Check - Non-ECC Speed - 667 MHz ( PC2-5300 ) Features - Dual rank , unbuffered You already have 2 1GB sticks in the machines - what speed are they? You should match the speed for all four sticks. The second set you mentioned are only 533 MHz, whereas your bus is 667 MHz. If your system is slow, get the fastest memory you can afford. Mark On Wed, Oct 8, 2014 at 1:51 PM, Carruth, Rusty wrote: Yes, 1024 is one gig, but often some memory is stolen by the motherboard – for example if you have an on-board graphics card that uses main memory for its RAM. Personally, if you can afford it and the 4G is less than 2x the 2G I’d get 4G – but if you could find 2x2G sticks then you could have 6G total – not bad IMHO. From: plug-discuss-bounces@lists.phxlinux.org [mailto:plug-discuss-bounces@lists.phxlinux.org] On Behalf Of Michael Havens Sent: Wednesday, October 08, 2014 1:43 PM To: PLUG Subject: memory I know this is a stupid question but... I got a Dell dimension c521. It is slow so I figure I should add memory. There are 4 memory slots with 2 being used. How much memory is that? Well, the cards that are in there say it they are two cards with 1024 mb apiece. 'free -h' reports free -h total used free shared buffers cached Mem: 1.9G 1.4G 489M 18M 59M 535M isn't 1024 one gig? Where is the rest? SHould I buy this? NEW 4GB 4x1GB DDR2 PC2-5300 667MHz RAM Memory for Dell Dimension C521 or should I get this? 2GB (2x1GB) RAM Memory CMS Compatible with Dell Dimension C521 Desktop :-)~MIKE~(-: --------------------------------------------------- PLUG-discuss mailing list - PLUG-discuss@lists.phxlinux.org To subscribe, unsubscribe, or to change your mail settings: http://lists.phxlinux.org/mailman/listinfo/plug-discuss