Linux Mint Forums

As I understand it, the pae kernel is for systems with 4GB of more of RAM.

My LMDE box has only 3 GB of RAM. Should I be using the pae kernel, or should I select the 2.6.32 kernel?

Thanks!

If your hardware is modern - try pae. I installed pae only for this reason . It works perfectly.

By the way. If you install other kernel, you always have (by default afaik) old kernels in grub to boot in. So, you don't loose anything. Just have a possibility to try something new.

My hardware is dated December 2004. Is that modern, or "historic" or Smithsonian?

DELL Dimension 8400 desktop P4 3.2ghz (not HT), 3GB RAM, 120GB hdd 7200 rpm, Nvidia GeForce 7200 (I think)

PAE won't hurt your system, but it provides you no benefit below about 3.7GB. The PAE kernel was tested on Phoronix versus the standard 32 and 64 bit kernels (all Ubuntu, same kernel series). The PAE was slower than the standard 32 bit kernel and both of those were slower than the 64 bit. Unless you have the RAM above the ~4GB threshold, there's really no need to use the PAE on your system. And if you have a 64 bit capable system there are few reasons, if any, to not use the 64 bit version of Mint.

the question is, at least with debian and LMDE ofc, (let's see what's happen to ubuntu later) that atm if you don't want to run a -pae kernel, you either go for a -486 or a amd64
http://forums.linuxmint.com/viewtopic.php?f=141&t=76911