Just installed Mint on a Lenovo. Didn’t know a thing about Linux 2 hours before I started. It wasn’t that hard. The directions on the mint site were pretty thorough.
I also installed Steam successfully but on some of the games, it crashes due to an lack of memory error. This unit has a 4 core AMD chip, 8g ram, 1T Hard drive (not SSD).
I notice that on occasion the hard drive spins up and it gets laggy( (mouse cursor sticks etc)
Are there any bios settings I should update to increase the use of the memory? The laptop is about 3 yrs old.
Now, on that, I have no idea.
I’d start by looking at Steam’s recommended system requirements. I suspect that’s it.
Could be memory. Or many the driver for the graphics card.
You could search YouTube for upgrade videos on your particular computer. If it’s a lack of memory, that could be an easy upgrade (as long as your computer can accept more than 8GB). And swapping out an SSD for a hard drive should speed things up significantly. I did both to my 2011 Acer.
My very first question would be - what kind of graphics card or chip does your Lenovo have? Many of them come with Shared Memory - which is deducted from your overall RAM. The speed of shared memory is a very slow option and can often hit bottlenecks, hence your issue. That is especially true when the game wants to load something else along the way, and the RAM gets bombarded with new data that needed to be defragmented.
So, when it comes to games, the priorities are:
Type of Graphics Card/Chip - and how much VRAM it has
