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    Adding memory to pfSense box? Reinstall needed?

    General pfSense Questions
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    • T
      thx100
      last edited by

      Hey everyone,

      First of all thanks to the developers and all posters here for invaluable advice while I lurked and learned.

      So, I have my pfSense box up and running on an old Dell dimension 2400, with a Celeron 2.4 Ghz chip and 512 Mb ram.  I saw that the box had been running between 60 and 80% ofg available ram so I went and got a second stick of pc3200 ram running at 333 Mhz.  The old stick of ram was pc3200 running at 266 Mhz.

      The box booted fine on the second attemrt - complained at POST on initial boot, I re-seated the stick of memory and it then booted fine - but does not see more than 512 GB of memory.

      Do I need to reinstall or reconfigure so that I can use both sticks of ram?

      Thanks in advance!!!!

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      • stephenw10S
        stephenw10 Netgate Administrator
        last edited by

        Nope it should just see it.
        Does it appear at the POST memory count?
        Do you have any of the diagnotic error LEDs lit yellow on the board?

        Steve

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        • T
          thx100
          last edited by

          Looks like I made an error in settling the stick into it's slot, and the old ram is pc2700, not pc3200 so I need to replace the new stick.

          Thanks for your help!

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          • stephenw10S
            stephenw10 Netgate Administrator
            last edited by

            A PC3200 stick will work just fine at 2700. Try switching the slots. That board should be good for up to 2GB (whatever Dell says) and they don't have to be matched.

            Steve

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            • G
              geekGee
              last edited by

              You may need to upgrade the BIOS of the Dell.  I recently added memory to a Dell and couldn't get two dissimilar memory sticks to coexist until I upgraded the BIOS.

              If you try it, I would recommend upgrading the BIOS with just the original stick installed in case an issue with the new stick causes the BIOS update to fail and potentially brick the computer.

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