[acabtp]

Maxing out the memory (RAM) on your Dell Mini is easy, cheap, and effective. Do it today!

Frequently Asked Questions
I thought the max was 1 gb? Why doesn't Dell offer it with more? - In order to ship the Mini with Windows XP instead of Windows Vista, there are...

Click here to read the entire tutorial

[WolfKeeper]

That is correct. The Dell Ubuntu kernel is limited to 1GB of RAM (Ubuntu reports back 883MB available.)

[Jazz1]

Arrggg! Why would Dell limit this to 1GB useful RAM? Would it be worth tossing the Dell Ubuntu version then?

[jbloodwo]

Originally Posted by Jazz1

Arrggg! Why would Dell limit this to 1GB useful RAM? Would it be worth tossing the Dell Ubuntu version then?

why would Dell offer anything else. Dell is only stating that the system supports 1 gig because they need to do that to get the low cost xp license.
does 2 gig work in windows.... yes. that is because ms did not redo the kernel for XP.
you should be able to recompile the kernel and enable huge memory and get all of the 2 gig.

[Jazz1]

Originally Posted by jbloodwo

why would Dell offer anything else. Dell is only stating that the system supports 1 gig because they need to do that to get the low cost xp license.
does 2 gig work in windows.... yes. that is because ms did not redo the kernel for XP.
you should be able to recompile the kernel and enable huge memory and get all of the 2 gig.

Hey thanks. I'd hate to think I wasted the money. I'll come back around for advice once I actually get the shipment from Dell.

[palawan]

thanks for the ram upgrade guide and the recommendations. i probably would not have upgraded if i didn't know it was possible to go above 1gb as shown here...

[suemccartin]

I just picked up a 2 gig sodimm crucial ram (usually very good stuff) off ebay for 20 bucks shipped. I believe it was pc6400 and yes, normally you can run a chip slower, they are backwards compatible as a rule. The mini 9 boots twice as fast as it did with only one gig. For those that don't understand pc5300, pc6400 etc. those are ram speeds and yes it does make a difference. If your motherboard is tuned for pc6400 it will run best with those, IF your book says it will support the slower pc5300 you can use those but you may lose performance (price/power tradeoff). There are different types of ram, currently most popular is DDR 2 but there is also DDR and SDRAM and a couple of other unusual types that came out over the last five years...then there is also something call ECC which is usually only seen on servers (Error correcting, it self checks every so many cyles, regular ram doesn't do this and that's why often if you're running something intensive for a long period your software will crash or the machine will freeze, it's because a few errors have crept in and the software or OS isn't taking proper account of that, ECC is slower because of the error check cyles that's mostly why it's not seen on anything but server setups).

Here's the supposed skinny on why dell only officially supports one gig. Apparently some MS$ (microsoft) bs about you can't get xp on a computer unless it can't support two gig for vista.......ew, vista, can I gag now please.

As far as going more ram? Two gig sodimm's are the biggest I know about, if someone comes out with a three or four gig single chip in the future it would depend on the bios on the mini if it could recognize it or if dell would release a bios update to handle it (most of the time memory compatibility and timings etc. can be dealt with by a bios upgrade). I liked my mini before, like it a lot more now it comes up waaaaaaaaaaaaay faster than before.

Another speed help is to go into settings and setup a larger swap file, if you've got the ssd space for a good sized swap file (virtual memory using disk space) that also speeds things up quite a lot; for whatever reason it comes preset with like a 200 meg swap file which is just not enough for a lot of things.

[2-J]

There are already 4gb SODIMMs.

But apparently the Intel Atom processor in the Dell mini 9 will not recognise more than 2gb ram.

[metalzo]

Quick question about upgrading the RAM. I plan on getting RAM faster than 533 MHz (DDR2-4200) since the price is nearly the same (either 667 or 800). I know the RAM can scale back and so it will still work in the Mini 9 but my question is whether I will take a performance and/or battery life hit using higher speed RAM in the Mini 9? If so I'll just go with the 533 MHz but I'd rather faster RAM in case I want to use it in another laptop sometime. Anyone know if the process of scaling back the speed of a 667 or 800 module will adversely effect my battery life or performance in XP Pro?

EDIT: Here is the RAM I'm probably going with: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... 6820231153

GSkill also has it with a heat spreader but I feel like in a laptop this small space is at a premium so the extra bulk is not a good idea.

[Jazz1]

Originally Posted by suemccartin

snip

Here's the supposed skinny on why dell only officially supports one gig. Apparently some MS$ (microsoft) bs about you can't get xp on a computer unless it can't support two gig for vista.......ew, vista, can I gag now please.

snip.

So does the 1GB RAM limitation apply to Mini 9's running Ubuntu? Sorry, I don't understand where this limitation is hard wired?

[jbloodwo]

Originally Posted by Jazz1

So does the 1GB RAM limitation apply to Mini 9's running Ubuntu? Sorry, I don't understand where this limitation is hard wired?

in this case the limit is in place at the kernel level of the os.
there are some flags that would need to be set in the make file to allow for more that 1 gig of ram.

Ubuntu (is/are) working on fixing this and we will see what happens.