I have a dual-boot system(win vista & ubuntu). Vista is really RAM hungry. After booting you got like 1gb of used RAM, … without starting any program. And those Adobe programs, like Lightroom & Photoshop, tend to use tremendous amounst of my precious RAM, too. Under ubuntu(which is blazing fast compared to vista) I got no problems with RAM at all.
As both operating systems are 64bit systems anyway, and therefor can make use of 4gb (and more) I decided to upgrade from 2gb to 4gb of RAM. The acer aspire 5920g has 2 slots for memory modules. So far it had 2x 1gb modules in it, which I replaced with 2 2gb modules. They costed me around 70€.
If you plan to do such an upgrade be sure to have an 64bit operating system installed. If you don’t you will not be able to use 4gb of RAM but rather 3.something.
The process of exchanging the modules is rather easy, anyone can do it. Just be sure you are not charged electrostatically, by touching something made of metal(like the heater). The hardest part was opening the body, as some guys of acer thought it would be smart to hide some of the srews under little plastic disks. It took some time for me to realize that if hadn’t removed all screws. Here is a picture showing all of them, so be sure to remove every one:
This is how the laptop looks from the inside. I marked the place where the RAM slots are:
Archive for the ‘Acer 5920g’ Category
acer aspire 5920g ram upgrade
Sunday, July 19th, 2009Acer 5920g Wireless LED Ubuntu 8.04
Tuesday, June 10th, 2008The Wireless LED wasn’t working with Ubuntu 8.04 until I did this:
sudo apt-get install linux-backports-modules-hardy
sudo rmmod iwl4965; sudo modprobe iwl4965
Now it lights solid if wireless is turned on. Under Windows its kind of blinking on network traffic, this is not the case here, though I personally prefer it to light solid.
setting up Wlan (Acer Aspire 5920g)
Friday, May 2nd, 2008My laptop(acer aspire 5920g) has built in wifi(Intel Wireless WiFi Link 4965AGN). The OS is Debian GNU/Linux, though it should work with other distros, too.
The Kernel module was already installed out of the box, but this one didn’t work for me, at least ifconfig and iwconfig didn’t show a wlan device. Thus I decided to compile the newest version myself. The sourcecode can be downloaded under click. To compile properly the kernel source/headers have to be installed. The rest is just some make, make install, make load routine. Follow the url above for more information.
The next step was to set up the gnome network-manager. (packages: network-manager and network-manager-gnome)
now edit /etc/network/interfaces and comment out all interfaces beside the loopback interface, otherwise the gnome network-manager will not work correctly. Now there should be an icon beside you clock at the top panel. Click on it to see the networks that are accessible. Choice one to connect. more information can be found here.
The network keys will be stored in the gnome-keyring. Therefore you will be prompted on every bootup to type in the password for the keyring. This can be avoided with the following steps:
- install the package libpam-keyring.
- now edit /etc/pam.d/gdm by adding the following lines at the end of the corresponding blocks (‘auth’, ‘session’)
-
auth optional pam_gnome_keyring.so
-
session optional pam_gnome_keyring.so auto_start
- now edit /etc/pam.d/passwd by adding the following line at the end of the password block:
-
password optional pam_gnome_keyring.so
The next time you boot there will a checkbox. select it as the last step.