Windows only reads 256MB out of 4GB of ram

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Windows only reads 256MB out of 4GB of ram

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Necr0man

Newbie

3. October 2008 @ 20:14

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I recently bought a computer from a friend (Dell 4600i 3.0Ghz). It only had 256MB of ram so I went and bought 4GB for it. I knew windows wouldn't utilize all of it but I was expecting @ 3.5BG and just wanted to get the Dual Channel running. Under the regular system properties it still says 256MB is installed and it's still running as slow as it was before. The BIOS reads 4BG, Crucial reads 4GB... the paging file is still only allocating 384MB... I manually set it to 4095MB... When I run the system information tool this is what it shows:

Total Physical Memory 4,096.00 MB
Available Physical Memory 37.38 MB
Total Virtual Memory 2.00 GB
Available Virtual Memory 1.96 GB
Page File Space 4.24 GB

I ran Belarc as well... another contradictory report:

256 Megabytes Installed Memory

Slot 'CHANNEL A DIMM 0' has 1024 MB
Slot 'CHANNEL B DIMM 0' has 1024 MB
Slot 'CHANNEL A DIMM 1' has 1024 MB
Slot 'CHANNEL B DIMM 1' has 1024 MB

I tried updating the BIOS already... didn't do anything. I know that it's not utilizing more than 256MB purely based on the still sluggish performance... Tried searching everywhere all over the internet but it's flooded with people trying to get windows to read a full 4BG on a 32-bit system so if the answer is out there it's buried in all that.

Any ideas? Anyone????

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Necr0man

Newbie

3. October 2008 @ 21:21

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Update: I ran CPU-Z and it says that my RAM frequency is 200MHz (should be 400MHz) and my voltage is 2.5 V (ram specs 2.6V - 2.75V). Maybe I'm having problems because of the wrong voltage? I know that dell locks their bios so I couldn't do a direct increase from there... If that is the problem... is there another way to increase the voltage?

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Necr0man

Newbie

4. October 2008 @ 09:50

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eh, no replies yet... I stuck my ram into my friends cpu and ran cpu-z... his system read all of it and cpu-z still said it was running at 2.5V so I'm thinking the voltage is not my issue. Spend 4 hours last night searching the web and messing with configurations but am still stumped.

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core2kid

AfterDawn Addict

23 product reviews

4. October 2008 @ 15:25

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Try one stick at a time. If not attempt to reformat to see if it works. One question, you have 4 1GB sticks of RAM inside and it shows that you have 256MB? In other words, your smallest stick of RAM is 1GB and it shows 256MB?

I think the OS is in fault here. I would reformat.

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This message has been edited since posting. Last time this message was edited on 4. October 2008 @ 15:27

kiwi1

Member

4. October 2008 @ 18:00

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Originally posted by Necr0man:
Update: I ran CPU-Z and it says that my RAM frequency is 200MHz (should be 400MHz) and my voltage is 2.5 V (ram specs 2.6V - 2.75V). Maybe I'm having problems because of the wrong voltage? I know that dell locks their bios so I couldn't do a direct increase from there... If that is the problem... is there another way to increase the voltage?

CPU-Z reads the voltage off the rams SPD. If you were to change the voltage in the bios it would still read 2.5v so dont worry about that. Also DDR400 ram runs at 200MHz (200MHz x DDR = 400MHz effective)

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