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-   -   how to tell specs of hardware installed? (https://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/linux-hardware-18/how-to-tell-specs-of-hardware-installed-125142/)

clockworks 12-12-2003 01:55 AM

how to tell specs of hardware installed?
 
my motherboard supports pc2700 memory and ultra ata133 ide devices (what is that called, "ultra ata133", what is that refering to?). how can i tell what kind of memory is installed in my computer already and also, if my harddrive is ata66 or ata100 or ata133, etc?

thank you.

jkobrien 12-12-2003 04:48 AM

The best way is to open your machine up and look inside.

You can get some information from the start-up messages "dmesg" and from the directory /proc.

Also some distro's have hardware probing tools. I think RedHat's is called superprobe, but read up on that first.

John

jkobrien 12-12-2003 05:31 AM

[oops! delete]

clockworks 12-12-2003 11:09 AM

thanks for your reply.

i looked up superprobe and it seems to be part of xfree86 and it just probes video cards.

about looking in the machine, i don't think there is a label on my ram for some reason, and my harddrive is ata100, but how can i tell if its running at that capacity?

thanks!

jkobrien 12-12-2003 11:44 AM

Oh yes, that's right. I just did "apropos hardware" to remind myself, and kudzu is what I was trying to think of. It writes to /etc/sysconfig/hwconf.

Your start up messages should tell you what RAM it found.

"dmesg | grep -i memory" and/or "cat /proc/meminfo".

I'm no hardware expert but ram chips usually have their capacity printed on them (the little black rectangles on one or both sides of the cards in your RAM slots).

As for testing it, make your computer scream and watch the file /proc/meminfo, or run "top" in a terminal. You can also watch to see if it starts to use the swap space, which AFAIK, only happens when RAM is maxed out. "cat /proc/swaps"

John


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