# 8 GB memory upgrade! Reinstall required ?



## redhead88 (Feb 6, 2012)

I have purchased the following memory 8 GB upgrade for my quasi-new Dell Inspiron 1750 laptop.

Current memory 3 GB with a 6 GB Swap partition on a 500GB or 459GB formatted hard drive.

Do I need to worry about reinstalling to have a correctly sized 16gb swap partition after I install the 8 GB of new RM?


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## kpa (Feb 6, 2012)

6GBs of swap will be enough unless you're going to use the swap for recovering crash dumps and in that case the minimum size for the swap would be the size of the physical memory.


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## phoenix (Feb 6, 2012)

Nope.  You only need swap == RAM if you need to get the contents of RAM in a crash dump for later debugging.  If you won't be doing kernel debugging, then you can get away with less swap than RAM.


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## silverglade00 (Feb 6, 2012)

Since it's a laptop, shouldn't the swap size be set at a little over the size of RAM for hibernation purposes?


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## wblock@ (Feb 6, 2012)

redhead88 said:
			
		

> I have purchased the following memory 8 GB upgrade for my quasi-new Dell Inspiron 1750 laptop.
> 
> Current memory 3 GB with a 6 GB Swap partition on a 500GB or 459GB formatted hard drive.
> 
> Do I need to worry about reinstalling to have a correctly sized 16gb swap partition after I install the 8 GB of new RM?



No, it should be fine.  But is the amd64 version of FreeBSD installed?  i386 is limited to less than 4G of memory.


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## redhead88 (Feb 6, 2012)

@wlock@ I have 64-bit FreeBSD 9.0 installed on aforementioned laptop.


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## michaelp (Feb 8, 2012)

Glad to read this I ordered 4 GB of RAM to max mine out. 64 bit..ZFS was complaining about disabling prefetch so I just ordered the RAM, it's cheap. I don't know what prefetch is but I enabled it and all is well. I hope all will be better when the RAM gets here


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