Q Is there a program that could report the used RAM slots in a machine? What's in them from the point of view of RAM per chip, bus speed, and so on? Crucial has an ActiveX utility for IE that does the job, but I'm not running Windows, and I don't want to install a browser add-on that has that much access to my hardware.
A I know of two programs that will display this information: lshw (http://ezix.org/project/wiki/HardwareLiSter) is a terminal program that shows plenty of information about your computer system, including specifics of the memory. This is the sort of information it gives.
*-memory description: System Memory physical id: 40 slot: System board or motherboard size: 4GB *-bank:0 description: DIMM SDRAM Synchronous 800 MHz (1.2 ns) product: PartNum0 vendor: Manufacturer0 physical id: 0 serial: SerNum0 slot: DIMM0 size: 1GB width: 64 bits clock: 800MHz (1.2ns) *-bank:1
For a graphical alternative, try HardInfo (http://hardinfo.berlios.de). This shows a different selection of information about your computer. Between the two, they should tell you all they need Incidentally, the output from these programs can be extremely useful to us when we're trying to answer your questions.