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I have a old netbook acer aspire one ZG5 which has 512MB DDR2 fixed on the mother board and one slot for second device of RAM which I suppose the max amount of ram added is 1GB!

Can I upgrade this ram to 4GB DDR2? or not? I know that I can't do that because the chipset supports only 2GB of RAM, is it true?

When I run demidecode -t 16 the output shows maximum capacity=4GB what's wrong? why this output shows max ram of 4GB?

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  • I think you should check the spec of your netbook. Get the exact model of your netbook and find the spec of your model. There you can find the exact details of how much your motherboard supports.
    – Chandrasekar
    Jul 9, 2015 at 14:33

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From the (few) sources available (such as this one at Engadget: http://www.engadget.com/products/acer/aspire/one/zg5/specs/), it would seem that the RAM controller chip in your netbook is capable of using only 2 RAM slots, each with up to 1 GBytes.

Since you already have 512 MBytes in one of the slots (soldered to the motherboard), following this reasoning you can only put in 1 GByte extra RAM in the other slot, giving the 1.5 GBytes total given in the reference above.

This being said, if you have a spare 2 GBytes DDR2 bar available, I would try it out and take it from there. The only thing I can see that would damage the RAM would be excess clock, but the Acer seems quite low in this respect.

Unfortunately, 4 GBytes seems impossible on this machine.

Hope this helps.

PS: if you find Ubuntu is a tad slow on this computer, it may also be due to the graphics card. A desktop with lower requirements such as LXDE, XFCE or Mate would probably help speed things up.

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  • thanks, I know for this netbook the max ram supported is 2GB, but WHY dmidcode -t 16 shows max capacity = 4GB ? what's the hack ?
    – vladimir pavloski
    Jul 9, 2015 at 15:07
  • @vladimirpavloski dmidcode can only report back the information that the BIOS provides it. Perhaps Acer built a single release of their BIOS for several models of computer, some of which did support 4 GBytes? My Aspire one KAV60 has exactly one RAM slot - and reports the same 4 GB limit as yours. On other types of BIOS, dmidcode returns no useful information. I would forget dmidcode, and rely more on what the kernel detects on bootup in dmesg. I have found it more precise in the past.
    – ALAN WARD
    Jul 9, 2015 at 17:06

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