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Comment by AnthonyMouse | Hacker News Reader

The reason this advice is bizarre is that old memory isn't actually that dear. The machines that would have had 2GB of RAM or less would be from the Core 2 Duo era or so, taking DDR2 or DDR3, and typically supported 8-16GB. 8GB of DDR3 is currently in the ballpark of $10 and the machines that take it can be found by the pallet in the "free e-waste" pile, so who is going to suffer <2GB instead of 8GB over $10?

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Intel mobile chipsets for Core 2 Duo only supported 2 or 4GB. And not all the desktop chipsets supported 8 or 16GB. I have a laptop with 3GB: one of the slots only supports 1GB.

Some mobile Core 2 Duos are able to use more. I have a working macbook unibody (2008) with a core 2 duo with 8gb of ram. Apple added the support in a firmware update:

https://eshop.macsales.com/blog/9102-secret-firmware-lets-la...

It's not that machines that only support less exist. It's that machines that support more are essentially free. They sell for the "you're really just paying the shipping and handling" price on the various marketplaces and if you ask anyone in the IT department of any company that isn't run by Ebenezer Scrooge they're $0.

There are a lot of old Chromebooks with only 2GB of RAM soldered to the motherboard. Other than that, they're surprisingly capable machines after you flash them with MrChromebox firmware.

Same with pre arm Atom indows tablets

With laptops of this era you only have two sodimm slots and DDR2 4GB RAM modules were quite expensive when they were new. So even still today they are more expensive than you would think. I sold mine for $25/each a few weeks ago.

Also some laptops of this era didn't support more than 4-6GB of RAM in the firmware. I know there are several models of early intel macbooks that you can physically install 8GB of RAM but they will not recognize it.

On the other hand, I have a 2010 iMac with all 4 DDR3 sodimm slots full giving it 32GB of RAM. It was a "just for fun" project before the AI prices. Those era iMacs are fully upgradeable (CPU, RAM, and GPU). Swapped in an i7 CPU, AMD m4000 GPU, and an SSD. Runs linux mint great.

I sold my P14s Gen5 AMD with 96GB RAM for more than I paid for it 18 months ago and resumed using my X230 w/i7-3615QE mod and 16GB DDR3 on Arch with MangoWM. It's fine. It's a worse computer, but not €1500 worse.

> 8GB of DDR3 is currently in the ballpark of $10

Where would I find it sold?

> and the machines that take it can be found by the pallet in the "free e-waste" pile

Hey, I'm using one to write this :(

Facebook marketplace for one.

EBay has dozens for <£12

ZRAM does miracles under GNU/Linux:

       sudo modprobe zram 
       sudo zramctl --find --size 512M
       sudo mkswap /dev/swap0
       sudo swapon /dev/zram0 -p 99

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