Friday, April 26, 2013

Quick and easy way to add memory to your Chromebook



I've been using a Chromebook since getting a CR-48 from Google a few years ago, and I love it. I am currently using a Samsung Chromebook, and our district is deploying over 5000 of them.

The Chromebooks, and Chrome OS in general, are fast and work great, but every once in a while they can bog down when doing serious multitasking. Many only have 2GB of RAM and do not offer the ability to add more RAM physically. I found out about a great way to increase your memory by using zRam which uses swap space on your hard disk/SSD. Kevin C. Tofel shared this great resource that is very easy to do.

Here are the simple steps:

  1. Open up a terminal tab with the CTRL + ALT + T keys.
  2. Type “swap enable” (without the quotes).
  3. Restart your Chromebook.
It's that easy. I did it and my Chromebook runs much smoother and faster and rarely bogs down, even with 15+ tabs open. 

Disabling it is easy too. Do all of the steps but type "disable" instead of "enable".

Give it a try and see how it improves your Chromebook's performance. 


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