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Sigh...pc not detecting new ram sticks.

Posted: Fri May 16, 2008 9:44 pm
by Zeratulx
I put in 2 x 1g sticks into my pc to bring it from 2gigs to 4 and it's only registering as 3. All of the sticks are the same brand, same mhz, etc. Any clue what could be causing this? This board supports up to 4 gigs of ram. I really fucking hope one of the sticks isn't bad.

Posted: Fri May 16, 2008 10:03 pm
by Nilbert500
got windows vista?

Posted: Fri May 16, 2008 10:05 pm
by Zeratulx
Nah still running XP, this machine is about 2.5 years old, I will be building another one soon though. Just got 2 more gigs of ram because ram is cheap.

Posted: Fri May 16, 2008 10:10 pm
by Nilbert500
im pretty sure you need vista to have 4 gigs of ram, xp is capped at 3. I could be wrong though.

Posted: Fri May 16, 2008 10:15 pm
by Candide
Yup, XP will only see up to 3.5. Don't worry about it. When you right click on My Compuer and look at properties, make sure it say 3.5 (some get a bit less). YOu can google something about the 3 gig switch, but I never bothered with it.

Posted: Fri May 16, 2008 10:15 pm
by Nilbert500
googled some forums and seems with 32 bit xp you won't get 4gb, you'll get around 3ish.

Posted: Fri May 16, 2008 10:22 pm
by Zeratulx
Well fuck, this I did not know. Thank you VERY much for such prompt answers guys. Do you think it would be best if I just remove one of the sticks since it really not being used?

Posted: Fri May 16, 2008 10:34 pm
by Candide
Nah, youshould be getting a bit out of it. And most ram works in pairs anyways, so you have to have it.

I noticed a pretty big difference between 2 and 4 in XP.

Posted: Sat May 17, 2008 8:52 am
by barbos
Leave it in, but you can't make use of all of it until you move to a 64bit OS (whether it be 64 bit XP or Vista)....

The difference would be minimal to move to 64bit for exactly 4gb of ram, because moving from 32bit to 64 bit registers requires more ram (since memory addresses are twice the size now)

By default Windows will only allow 2gb of memory to be used by applications and will reserve the rest for it's own operations. You can add a /3GB switch to the boot.ini file to tell it to let applications address up to 3gb and leave only a maximum of 1gb of ram for windows. This really isn't recommended though since you shouldn't be running any applications that actually need that much active ram at once.

Posted: Sat May 17, 2008 3:30 pm
by Abysmal
Sorry if this has been covered in detail already, but I am in a bit of a hurry:
a 32 bit operating system like most versions of xp can only address 4 gigs of address space. The big problem that I ran into is that this includes video memory i.e. I have a 768 meg video card, so that only leaves ~3200 megs of useable ram, with 2x 2 gig sticks installed.