Abit-IC7 w two2 channel kits of ram: what am I doing wrong?

[HansSvetty]

I have 2 year old 512 sticks of matched Corsair DDR 400 PC3200 XMS and added 2 1g sticks of A-Data Vitesa from New egg (on sale)

The IC-7 motherboard (that I still like well) is dual channel, with four memory slots. Bios says I'm running dual channel.

So I've got three times the RAM and general tasks seem slower? Hard to tell, but I had expected to notice something positive.

In despair I disabled the paging file, as if that was supposed to fix something.

I have just enough knowledge to be dangerous to myself.

 

[RebateMonger]

Did you try the /3GB switch in your boot.ini file? It might help, depending on the applications that use use. Mostly it's only helpful with enterprise-level apps. It affects the way that memory is allocated to system and user.
Sysinternals: use of /3GB switch in XP
Microsoft Support: Use of /3GB switch

 

[HansSvetty]

No I did not. It is hard to understand, but thanks. Maybe I should try balancing the channels, have one stick of 512 and one of 1g on each channel.

Or ditch the 512 sticks and run 1g per channel.

 

[RebateMonger]

If the BIOS says the memory is running in Dual Channel mode, then you've installed the memory correctly.

What kinds of applications are you running? For most people and most common applications, you won't see much difference once you get above 512MB of RAM. Yes, there ARE applications that will run faster, or may even REQUIRE large amounts of RAM. But they aren't that common.

 

[HansSvetty]

Well, I use Microsoft Flight Simulator a lot, with scenery add-ons, and it is very graphic intense. My new GF 6800 AGP really helps. Fear runs ok now too. Half-Life 2 seems good, and this used to give me an eyeache. My new SATA drive with a 16 mg cache is not hurting either I guess.

I was just wondering if I should fix my pagefile at 1gb or something?

I'm trying to use O&O defrag now to put file names in order alphabetically within folders...maybe that will help.

thanks