I got my new M800 4/12/2008, second-hand, but never opened (still in sealed plastic).

It came with about a 4 gig card in the external slot, but no card under the rear panel. Is this normal?

No. It comes with a 128mb card (uninstalled) and no 4gb card.

OK.

Well, the guy I bought from did say he would throw in a 4 Gb card & keyboard, but I thought it came sealed, so that threw me off.

Anyway, should I get the 128 Mg card? and why? It seems to work OK without it.

Thanks.

I wouldn't worry about the 128MB, it's awfully small. Maybe get another card when you have the need. I could be wrong, but I think my N800 is happier, at those times that it has only 1 card, if the card is in the internal slot. That's where I'd put your 4GB for now.

No, don't bother, the only reason Nokia include it in the retail package is because it's cheaper than a bigger card. If you have a bigger card stick with it.

You don't need two cards, but you can use two cards if you want to.

In fact you don't technically need any memory cards at all, they're only really needed if you want to store large amounts of music or video, or if you want to create backups of your tablet's memory.


There are two slots on the N800 because some people like to use the internal card for enlarging the tablet's RAM using "virtual memory". Most people don't bother doing this though because you don't really need to.

My personal recommendation to everybody is to enable virtual memory. The benefits definitely outweigh any pitfalls (notably the loss of 128MB of storage and the potential for system instability in the case of card corruption), as it basically eliminates any out-of-memory situations that might crop up in normal usage and makes certain games and applications usable (Wesnoth is a good example here).

I use the small MMC card + adaptor in internal socket purely for virtual memory, as I don't care if swapping causes premature failure; I use a 4GB non-sdhc in external slot for all my other files.

I don't understand "swapping", "swappiness", "premature failure", & related concepts I've seen discussed here. Nor am I conversant in linux. If it's not too much trouble, please give me a thumbnail explanation.

Do I need an adapter so that the 4GB card will fit in the internal slot? If so, where to obtain one?

Thanks.

C'mon, Sam, it's not a woman; it's OK just trying to stick it in before asking.