System memory, or RAM, is so absurdly cheap today – often times it’s one of the easiest PC upgrades to do that actually affect your day to day performance. What you determined sufficient two years ago when you purchased your PC likely is different today. Software continues to evolve, or bloat as some may suggest, so throwing a few dollars at an elder PC may stave off the upgrade urge another year. Unfortunately, the age of your PC can also be the downfall when it comes time to upgrading it – do you still remember what memory type and speed it requires?

Here’s how to find out the answer to that question on a Linux PC. Tomorrow, we’ll tackle to same problem on the Windows side.

Open a terminal window and execute the command dmidecode –type memory.

The command will dump a wall of text in your terminal window so scroll up to the block beneath the command line execution. First, you can see a few specifications regarding your motherboards feature set. Specifically, in this example, you can see the maximum capacity is 8 GB spread across 4 devices – or memory slots. Therefor, the maximum memory module size is 2 GB.

Scrolling through the rest of the dmidecode output you will see a block of information for each memory device – again, in this case we’ll find 4 memory device blocks.

In our example, within the memory device block it’s quick to find that the memory module in this slot is 1024 MB with a form factor of DIMM (by far the most common). The memory type is DDR2 with a speed of 800 Mhz. Therefor, when you are shopping for the best price on memory you want to ensure you are comparing DDR2-800 memory since that is what you will need for your upgrade!

Not only can dmidecode speak to the memory installed in your Linux PC – it can also speak to the memory not installed. Looking at the details of a memory device block you can also tell if the slot  has no module installed.

Piecing together the information gathered by dmidecode you will not only find out which memory to buy but also if your motherboard has any available memory slots for the upgrade – otherwise you are looking at purchasing a larger size module of memory while ensuring it does not exceed the maximum capacity as we learned above.