Andrei Popescu wrote:
On Fri, 05 Jan 2007 17:45:40 +0000
andy <geek_show@dsl.pipex.com> wrote:
Andrei Popescu wrote:
On Fri, 05 Jan 2007 16:18:27 +0000
andy <geek_show@dsl.pipex.com> wrote:
Although the man page will identify as a bug that the info in
dmidecode can be completely wrong (!), this does show that I have
1024MB of RAM - i.e. 1GB. So, somewhere betwixt BIOS and fired up
Etch I have lost recognition for 250MB-odd of memory.
Thanks for your thoughts. On a note that might be related, I have
just watched an *.avi video from the hard-drive using Totem and was
drawing 100% CPU, with 42% of memory in cache. Perhaps this is
normal ?
My only strange experiences with Etch thus far are:
* not having the full 1 GB stick recognised,
* the heavy use of CPU,
* the overflow into swap, and
* the occasional hard freeze when burning DVDs after converting
them from non-DVD formats
Perhaps these issues are related? Could I have a bad stick of RAM?
Is it software? Will the Knoppix and memtest86 CDs you mention
help sort out which is which?
Thanks for your thoughts.
A
You still didn't answer any questions about the video card. Maybe
you have an on-board chipset with shared mem?
Regards,
Andrei
Sorry Andrei, that e-mail must have slipped past my radar. The
graphics card is 128MB ATI Radeon X200 Express Graphics built-in. I
think that it is a 32-bit and that memory is prefetchable
[size=256MB]. If this means that it shares memory from the RAM chip,
then yes, this would account for the missing RAM.
A
AFAIK prefetchable means something else, but if the chip is built-in it
might use shared memory. Just look through the bios settings, the
amount of shared memory is usually configurable.
Regards,
Andrei
OK - next reboot I'll look through the BIOS settings. I would be
looking to reduce the amount of shared memory, but by how much? I am
assuming that disabling or reducing it to 0 would negatively impact on
performance?
Thanks for your input.
A
|