added RAM now kernel slow

[juszczec]

Hello

I'm running RedHat 6.2, kernel 2.2.16 on a Compaq Presario 2266 225Mhz Pentium, 64MB RAM. Since Compaq's website says its upgradable to 256MB ram, I added 128MB Micron DIMM SDRAM 100Mhz - which their website says is acceptable. This brought the system to 192MB ram.

I added a line to lilo.conf indicating the amount of available RAM, since I had more than 128MB.

The system booted and ran slowly enough to be unusable.

I'm finding conflicting information from Compaq up to and including the local Compaq service center saying use 66Mhz RAM.

Does anyone have any experience adding RAM to this type of machine and running Linux on it?

Mark

 

[LocalHero]

The only thing i can think of is that you are using an old motherboard with tx chipset. They only enable cache for the first 64mb. But there seams to be more problems Hope it helps

/
Alexander

 

[juszczec]

Alexander

Thanks for your reply. After kicking over a few more rocks, I found out the following information.

Crucial Technology's tech support told me that the Presario 2266 doesn't have enough cache to support more than 128Mb RAM. They said see if I could add cache. Compaq tells me no, the cache is built in to the CPU - I'd have to upgrade the CPU. So, today I placed an order for an AMD K6-2 333Mhz processor that got the nod from a post on the Compaq Customer Communities forum. Compaq's Product Information call center said that the AMD was a better bet than their recommended Celeron 475Mhz cpu since the AMD got the nod on the community forum.

At any rate, this still does not explain why Windows runs fine with all 192Mb RAM and Linux can only access up to 128MB of it (specified with the append line in lilo). Anything up to and including 128Mb runs just fine, anything over that causes Linux to crawl.

Does anyone have any ideas about that?

Thanks

Mark

 

[juszczec]

Alexander and all,

After installing the new processor Linux can access all of the RAM.

Mark