New (used) PC or upgrade?

Can you see what the resource bottleneck is during use? RAM looks low but could be something else to.

That said, unless you're really constrained on budget then given it's over 10 years old I'd personally just replace it rather than spend more money on it. Also bear in mind there's different versions of TPM, I think Win11 needs 2.0+, which a PC over 10 years old won't have

Ubuntu is always fairly miserly when it comes to allocating a swap file, so you're likely running out of memory. As a test, add a large (say 12Gb) swap file to your existing system and see if that fixes the crashes (at the expense of speed)

Fwiw - I've got a far older setup in the living room which I use for gaming, runs like a champ but it does have 16Gb ram and a reasonable gfx card

https://askubuntu.com/questions/1264568/increase-swap-in-20-04

Can you see what the resource bottleneck is during use? RAM looks low but could be something else to.

Good thinking, should be able to do that in Ubuntu. No point putting more RAM in if that's not the limit.

That said, unless you’re really constrained on budget then given it’s over 10 years old I’d personally just replace it rather than spend more money on it. Also bear in mind there’s different versions of TPM, I think Win11 needs 2.0+, which a PC over 10 years old won’t have

I see your point. I'm pretty reluctant to spend more than a couple of hundred quid (mainly through general tightness!). Thanks for the tip re. TPM 2.0/Win 11 (I was today years old when I learnt TPM is a thing). In no rush to move to W11, but W10 support stops in 2025, so would be a bit annoying to have to upgrade again in 2 years time.

@stevehine interesting, will try that, thanks.

Graphics is just onboard, but don't suppose I'm going to gain much by adding a dedicated card if I'm not gaming? Driving two monitors, not sure how much difference that makes.

You might see a small benefit as modern window managers all use compositing, but it's unlikely to be earth shattering if you're not doing anything with 3d

Other alternative is motherboard + CPU + ram upgrade... Can get that in a bundle. Though might need to upgrade PSU and heatsink too. Just be careful if budget important as some CPU don't have integrated graphics.

It has TPM so compatible with Windows 11 should that be needed in the future.

Win11 requires a much more modern CPU. You can check compatibility online, but unless you have a 10th generation i-series CPU, you won't be able to upgrade.

https://www.awd-it.co.uk/components/cpu-memory-motherboard-bundles.html?product_list_order=price_low_to_high

Prices are without ram, but lots of RAM options before adding to basket. Careful though... dangerous... Klarna alert...

Thanks @sirromj. Those bundles are much cheaper than I thought they would be. £100 would get me something roughly equivalent to what I have now in terms of clock speed, in a more modern CPU, more RAM, and USB 3 would be nice for future proofing (or now proofing come to think of it). £200 would get me a significant upgrade.

Will have to check the PSU. Any other potential compatibility issues? Bog standard ATX case, SATA drives.

My father in law does exactly the same with his computer, just upgraded to a second hand Lenovo Thinkcentre from Laptops Direct for 230 quid after his desktop went pop.

https://www.laptopsdirect.co.uk/refurbished-lenovo-thinkcentre-m910q-core-i5-7500t-16gb-500gb-nvme-windows-t1-m910q-mini/version.asp

Handles Adobe CC and Grafi Studio fine.

Win11 requires a much more modern CPU. You can check compatibility online, but unless you have a 10th generation i-series CPU, you won’t be able to upgrade.

I mean, you can, it just requires a simple work around which they may or may not support in future.

Will have to check the PSU. Any other potential compatibility issues? Bog standard ATX case, SATA drives.

Should be fine but some of the more expensive heatsink+fans need a big case. The new MB I bought didn't have any PCI slots so I had to ditch the ancient budget-pro-audio card I'd didn't really use any more anyway.

4GB with integrated graphics probably using half of it? Check first as above of course, but I reckon I'd be throwing RAM at that.

I'm just here to comment on this and say Framework laptops, for those needing replacements and not wanting to have to chuck it to upgrade in the future. I haven't bought one as I over specced the last laptop and it's been ok for AGES. As and when I do need to replace, they'll be on my list.
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It'd be interesting to know what is crashing in Ubuntu. You ought to be able to see evidence of things like the "out of memory" killer running in the system logs.

I'd definitely want more RAM for desktop use. That said, don't get too hung up on clock speed when considering a CPU/mobo/RAM upgrade: CPU speed hasn't improved much for some years, but stuff like IO throughput has improved a lot and will make a significant difference to how snappy a machine feels.

So freshly booted, opening Chrome, and the CPU seems to be bouncing off the limit, whereas the memory isn't being particularly taxed:

But streaming the radio and doing some photo editing, it crashed, seeming to run out of memory @ 20 secs:

I've increased the swap file to 4Gb now.

Looks like I could get 16Gb of RAM for about £20, which seems worth it to string this machine along for a bit longer.

4GB with integrated graphics probably using half of it? Check first as above of course, but I reckon I’d be throwing RAM at that.

I've got an open PCIe 16 slot - is it worth sticking in a basic graphics card in to take some load off the processor? Presumably such a thing is very old tech and therefore cheap now? e.g, from a very brief ebay search: https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/154290909476?epid=17044125855

PSU is 300W so guess that might limited upgrades?

Check what support available for graphics card. Probably need legacy nvidia drivers for that one ^^^... Although you're not fused about gfx performance so the open source/non proprietary driver probably fine.

It’d be interesting to know what is crashing in Ubuntu.

Mostly Chrome and darktable (photo editor), which is pretty much all I use, but anything remotely demanding.

Anything show up from sifting through (sudo/root access might be needed):

dmesg

or

journalctl -b

Trouble is these are usually littered with red-herrings that can be ignored.

I'll let you know - haven't managed to crash it since enlarging the swap file, which is nice 🙂

Yeah that's struggling for memory.

To be honest if it's swapping that's A Bad Thing as performance will fall off a cliff due to the fact that disk IO is a lot slower than RAM IO.

Streaming internet radio doesn't feel like it should be memory hungry but the fact just running Chrome is causing swap to be used is a cause for concern. Plus it depends a bit on what "streaming" looks like, an overly fancy JavaScript player could eat memory 🤷‍♂️

If you're generally happy with the CPU then maxxing out RAM (I think you said it'll take 16GB?) would help matters a lot.

Yeah buy some cheap ram from CEX. Bout all you can do with it aside from a full rebuild.

4gb just isnt enough, 8gb is the bare minimum but 16gb is cheap so why not.

What is it DDR3?

£20

https://uk.webuy.com/product-detail?id=smem16qaa&categoryName=memory-desktop-ddr3&superCatName=computing&title=16-gb-pc10600-ddr3-1333mhz-240-pin-memory&referredFrom=category&queryID=1e4057e6efd11947c5dac8412d64c6a2&position=37

Win11 requires a much more modern CPU. You can check compatibility online, but unless you have a 10th generation i-series CPU, you won’t be able to upgrade.

Also this - Sky lake/Kaby lake and older CPU's simply arn't supported by windows 11.

Yeah; that goes with what I suspected; you're using near enough the full 4GB of RAM just opening Chrome. 16Gb will probably fix your problems and buy you a few years if you are otherwise happy with the performance 🙂

I saw that RAM from CEX but from the reviews it sounds like they just send out whatever they have lying around and hope it's what's specified and it works.

I picked up 2x8Gb of lightly-used off-brand (Xum, never heard of them, but Amazon reviews seem overwhelmingly positive) RAM for the princely sum of £13 posted. If that keeps it going for another couple of years, it'll be well worth it.

Thanks for all the help 🙂

Step 1 after installing, boot off a memtest USB.

With apologies for smoothly segueing this into a tech support request...

Installed my new RAM and tried to boot (before I'd seen Cougar's post) and I get as far as the Ubuntu login screen, but when I put my password in, it hangs and/or powers off. Tried various combinations of module(s) and slots, but all the same. Old RAM back in: boots fine, so I haven't knocked something loose.

Tried memtest: runs fine with my old RAM as a control, starts to run on the new RAM, crashes and powers off within a few seconds, same with both or either module.

Can't see any compatibility issues. Board is an Intel DQ57TM, from the manual:

Main Memory
NOTE
To be fully compliant with all applicable Intel
board should be populated with DIMMs that support the Serial Presence Detect (SPD)
data structure. If your memory modules do not support SPD, you will see a
notification to this effect on the screen at power up. The BIOS will attempt to
configure the memory controller for normal operation.
The board has four DIMM sockets and supports the following memory features:
•
Two independent memory channels with interleaved mode support
•
Support for non-ECC, unbuffered, single-sided or double-sided DIMMs with x8
organization
•
Support for ECC unbuffered memory when used with an Intel Xeon 3400-series
processor
•
16 GB maximum total system memory (with 2 Gb memory technology)
•
Minimum total system memory: 1 GB using 1 Gb x8 modules
•
Serial Presence Detect
•
DDR3 1333 MHz and DDR3 1066 MHz SDRAM DIMMs
NOTE
32-bit operating systems are limited to a maximum of 4 GB of memory. These
operating systems will report less than 4 GB because of the memory used by add-in
graphics cards and other system resources.
NOTE
When using a processor without Intel
installed in either or both of the DIMM 0 (blue) memory sockets for the system to
boot.

RAM is XUM DX8GDDR3U1600: DDR3, 1600Mhz (faster than my motherboard can use, but shouldn't be a problem), non ECC desktop RAM

Tried reducing the memory voltage from 1.5 to 1.35V but no difference.

Could it be a power supply issue? PSU is only 300W, but wouldn't have thought the extra RAM, especially one module would need much more power.

Any ideas?

Ram doesn't use much power to speak of, in context of whether your PSU can cope with it.

I's assume its faulty or a config issue - depending on what BIOS options you have, are you able to manually set the ram speed to some speed lower than the motherboards max? I'm kinda guessing here but if it's trying to run at a speed faster than the motherboard can support that could be one thing to rule out if possible.

Have you tried running the bios reset/autoconfig ?

https://www.manualslib.com/manual/440758/Intel-Dq57tm.html?page=58

Wouldn't surprise me if the memory timings from your previous sticks are causing issues

Have you tried running the bios reset/autoconfig ?
> https://www.manualslib.com/manual/440758/Intel-Dq57tm.html?page=58 < Wouldn’t surprise me if the memory timings from your previous sticks are causing issues

Yes BIOS reset also worth a try - another way to do it is to remove teh button battery and mains cable for a few mins and then replace.

SPD should take care of timing issues unless you've had previous adventures in overclocking and set everything up manually.

Pulling the CMOS battery is very 20th Century. There should be a reset / default option within UEFI if it comes to that point.

If you're getting the same symptoms on both sticks when each one is installed on its own in turn then that would suggest a compatibility issue or misconfiguration rather than a fault.

Tried a BIOD reset - nada.

From what (very) little I know about RAM timing, which is 100% more than yesterday, it seems that's probably the issue. There's no option to change the timing in the BIOS. BIOS is the latest version BTW.

Someone with the same board had an almost identical problem here: https://forums.tomshardware.com/threads/windows-wont-start-after-ram-upgrade.2605848/

Seems I need to chalk this one up to experience and find some 1333Hz RAM - I couldn't find any in 8Gb sticks, so might have to go 4x4Gb. That'll teach me to try and be clever AND tight at the same time. In my defence, the guy on the thread I linked found RAM with an identical spec from the Crucial compatibility tool.

Appreciate the help everyone, thanks.

That's a point in itself - the mobo may support up to 16GB but that doesn't mean it supports 8GB modules.

Faster RAM shouldn't make a fig of difference (to borrow a mantra from other threads, it's a limit not a target). 2x8 instead of 4x4 might well do.

I can't open that link / dig any further just now I'm afraid, my Internet connection is little more than semaphore.

Seems I need to chalk this one up to experience and find some 1333Hz RAM – I couldn’t find any in 8Gb sticks, so might have to go 4x4Gb.

Something like this maybe?

https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/155206704422?hash=item24230a5d26:g:5FEAAOSwkf5jR6~E

Thanks @mattyfez, that looks perfect, except...

That’s a point in itself – the mobo may support up to 16GB but that doesn’t mean it supports 8GB modules.

I haven't found anything that suggests it doesn't, but of course, that's not the same thing. So maybe rather than buying more 8Gb sticks that turn out to be useless to me, I should just find 4x4Gb sticks.

Faster RAM shouldn’t make a fig of difference (to borrow a mantra from other threads, it’s a limit not a target)

<p style="text-align: left;">As I say, my knowledge on this is very limited, but, no, the frequency shouldn't matter per se, but it sounds like it strongly suggests (though I can't find a spec for the RAM nor the mobo) different, incompatible timing, which does when you can't adjust it on the mobo (or it won't adjust itself to something compatible). I'm not the expert here, but it seems like a plausible explanation.</p>
Either way 4x4Gb of the right frequency should have a better chance of working. Will have a search, but first, ride+pub.

Thanks again.

the frequency shouldn’t matter per se,

Looking at your link to the motherboard manual it says:

16 GB maximum total system memory (with 2 Gb memory technology). Refer to
Section 2.1.1 on page 41 for information on the total amount of addressable
memory.
•
Minimum total system memory: 1 GB using 1 Gb x8 module

•
DDR3 1333 MHz and DDR3 1066 MHz SDRAM DIMMs

So that may explain why the RAM you bought doesn't work, as it's supposed to run at a higher frequency than your motherboard suggests is compatible... (forget ram timings, thats a different thing).

I can't see anything that says it doesn't support 2x8gb modules or 4x4gb, or even 1x16gb.

In my experience, having all 4 slots populated can stress the memory controller more than just 2 or 1. Which can lead to instability, But that's more to do with overclocking, I wouldn't think it would apply to generic ram modules as long as they are 'in spec'.

So basically I think you'll be fine with 2x8gb, or 4x4gb as long as the frequency is 1333 MHz or 1066 MHz.

Just to close this off, I bought 4x4Gb of 1333MHz RAM for about £20 and now it's all gravy, so thanks again for the advice.

So that may explain why the RAM you bought doesn’t work, as it’s supposed to run at a higher frequency than your motherboard suggests is compatible… (forget ram timings, thats a different thing).

FWIW, I don't think that's correct. Every other thread on the internet suggests running RAM at a lower frequency than it's rated for is perfectly fine, as long as the timing is compatible. Presumably the clock signal will be generated on the motherboard and the RAM is a passive and will work at this frequency, as long as it's not higher than the spec.