So recently I have taken to fixing up an old family computer of mine. It has been a fun project restoring the first computer I ever touched. It's an old Gateway "GT5449E" desktop that, from what I could tell, was released in 2004 going from the BIOS (there is no information on this particular model, go figure). In relation to topic subject, it utilized two 1GB DDR2 RAM sticks in one channel, with the other two being empty. I eventually decided to order another two DDR2 RAM sticks to fit the slots the original motherboard came with. These new RAM sticks were 2GB respectively.
Each of these "channels" (slots) were marked white and black respectively, in the order of white, black, repeat. I put the new 2GB RAM sticks in the original channel (the two white slots), and proceeded to move the original two 1GB RAM into the other channel (the two black slots). I used
hardinfo
to check and see if the RAM was recognized by the OS. hardinfo
gives the total amount of memory as 3589480 KiB (when I put this through a converter, it calculated to about 4GB of RAM).I decided to turn off the PC, reconnect the RAM with their respective slots, and boot into the BIOS of my PC. The BIOS was able to read all of the RAM, noting that each slot had 2048 MB (2GB), 1024 MB (1GB), 2048 MB, 1024 MB of RAM in each slot respectively. Booting back into LMDE and running
hardinfo
again yielded the same result as the paragraph before. My conclusion is that LMDE recognizes the two 2GB RAM sticks in the white channel (slots), but not the two 1GB RAM sticks in the black channel (slots). Anyone know why is this may be the case?