[ale] OT: Cheap Laptop w/o shared RAM

[Vernard Martin]

Courtney Thomas wrote:
> I have a Dell Latitude C810 wtih the maximum RAM installed, which I 
> believe is 512MB, Pentium III 133 mhz, 16 MB video RAM, 20 Gig HD w/5 
> Gig free.
ACtually, the Dell C810 will take considerably more RAM than that. AT 
least 1GB if I recall. But you might have to swap out your memory. 
Sounds like you have 2x 256MB sticks and I know taht it can take at a 
minimum 2x 512MB sticks as that is what I used when I had mine.

The reason you
>  
> Does this mean it does not have shared video ram and will increasing 
> video ram from 16 to 32 MB significantly speed up this machine ?
The Dell C810s that have an Nvidia video chip in them will NOT be able 
to use the systems RAM to increase that. Its an all or nothing kind of 
thing.
>  It seems to be incessantly paging stuff back and forth to the HD. Are 
> there settings that will optimize this too ? Will doubling the video 
> RAM significantly improve this activity, as well ?
>  
this is simply an issue of not having enough ram for the work that you 
are doing. If you running Linux then open up a terminal and type "free 
-m". You should see something like this:
[root at vcmarti1 ~]# free -m
                             total       used       free     shared    
buffers     cached
Mem:                      3874       3831         43          0        
203       2343
-/+ buffers/cache:     1284       2590
Swap:                     1983          0       1983

This shows how much ram and swap you are using. As you can see from my 
syste, I have about 4GB of RAM and I'm using most of it. But I am not 
using ANY of my Swap. And I've got a good bit of data in my cache. By 
default, linux trys to use as much RAM as possible to cache things like 
files to speed up access. This is because on average, RAM is 1 million 
times faster than Disk. nanoseconds for RAM speeds vs milliseconds. That 
is 10^-9 vs 10&-3. A difference of 10^6 which is 1 million. This is 
usually why the fastest way to speed up a computer is to increase the 
size of its ram.

If you are using swap and adding more RAM will usually help. But of 
course, not always.

Vernard