Hi all,

I've been using antiX on a very old Compaq Presario 4620 (P-II @ 266 MHz, 256 MB ram) for a couple of weeks now and I amazed to see how much this old horse can still do with the right OS loaded. __{{emoticon}}__

Anyways, up until now I thought this box has enough ram, because on the desktop conky tells me there's always enough ram free, even though the swap-file has to kick in from time to time.

But,"top" tells quite a diffent story."top" says nearly all ram is in use.

Huh? What gives? I need to set up a distro on someone else's computer that is getting too old to run many modern distros. Ram is the issue on that box.

So which is right? Conky or top?

(Edit: marked solved. Also see post #5 in this tread)

clicky, and follow a few of the links to read about conky disregarding buffer memory overhead:

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Sometimes the conky doesn't give you a TRUE value of memory.

__{{emoticon}}__
I've tinkered with many of the older desktops and laptops. While the manufacturer may say 256 Mb is the most memory it can hold, I have found that many will take more. I am assuming that you now have two (2) 128 Mb chips installed. Try getting a couple of 256Mb sdram 168-pin DIMMs (ebay is a good spot to search for used ones), and install them. If the BIOS doesn't scream, you will now have 512 Mb of memory to play with.
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The OEM specs on my JUNKBOX motherboard was for 128 MB max, but I am running it at 512 MB with no problems.

NOTE: Not all of the older boards will allow this. Some will only accept what the manufacturer installed because of BIOS constrictions. But you can try it and see if you want.

Good luck.

EDIT: New egg has the 512 Mb (2 x 256 Mb) non-ECC on sale $14.45 with free shipping this week.

In top, all uses of ram are shown, the system usage & the cached usage plus swap, what concerns you is how much the system uses.
Programs like Firefox take quite a bit of ram, but if you are not running other programs at the same time, likely you'll be fine.

After some digging around I have come to the conclusion that top interprets free memory somewhat differently. Memory marked as"free" in top is memory that is completely unused.

I found this site to be quite helpful:
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So it would seem that conky's representation of free memory is the one the avarage user can rely on.

I'm going to mark this thread as solved.

Thanks everyone.