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Looking in plain memory monitor in GNOME I see only 15.5Gb of memory available. Normally it's 2x8Gb in the laptop.

$ free -m gives me this:
             total       used       free     shared    buffers     cached
Mem:         15853      12155       3697          0        650       9346
-/+ buffers/cache:       2158      13694
Swap:          952          0        952

$ htop shows: 15853MB

The processor in the laptop is i5-3320M

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When you say "normally" do you mean that this same laptop with this same OS was reporting 16Gb last week and now its not? Is this system using on-board memory for the graphics hardware and is it set to allocate 512Mb to graphics, by any chance? – RobM Jan 9 at 8:14
this utility shows the total amount of RAM available to you. It never shows the exact amount of physical memory installed.. – pauska Jan 9 at 8:23
No, i use only nVidia graphics with drivers properly installed and working. By normally i meant: I got it with win pre-installed and it was showing 16Gb as usual. btw. i also remember that i had similar problem with last laptop and Debian, also showing 3.7Gb instead of 4Gb that were installed. (also, nVidia was in use there too) – mariotanenbaum Jan 9 at 8:27
@pauska exactly that is my question, why i can't use all memory? – mariotanenbaum Jan 9 at 8:28
What nVidia adapter? Saying it's using "nvidia" is like saying "I got it with Microsoft pre-installed". – RobM Jan 9 at 12:09

closed as off topic by Michael Hampton, Alex, Tom O'Connor, mdpc, John Gardeniers Jan 10 at 2:28

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1 Answer

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Try this:

$ free -sim

Here the discrepancy comes from whether you are counting 1kB a 1,000 bytes or 1,024 bytes (2^10). Hardware vendors usually use the definition that makes the number look larger. Visit also http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kilobyte for more details.

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Where's your free from? The latest procps version (3.2.8) doesn't have a --si switch. – scai Jan 9 at 8:34
Linux Mint - procps Version: 1:3.3.3-2ubuntu3. – Marc Lijour Jan 9 at 8:48
Ah that's procps-ng, a fork. Very interesting. – scai Jan 9 at 9:17

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