RAM recognized as half?

[gwwfps]

A friend of mine was running his PC all well and good until today.
He always had 1G of ram, made up of 2 sticks of 512M.
Now, suddenly, they are recognized as 2 sticks of 256M by the mobo (Asus P4B533).
Anyone know what might be the problem?

 

[stu1811]

BIOS update?

EDIT: Try reseating the ram. If that fails run memtest on each stick to see if one or both are failing.

 

[fire400]

that's odd, do a BIOS reset and update BIOS.

are you sure nobody went into his room and swapped out the sticks? can you confirm on the lables they're 512's sticks times two? sounds dumb but I had to ask.

 

[Steaksauce]

Are you looking at the BIOS to find the memory sizes or some other program? Might be the software giving out wrong info.

 

[letdown427]

Take out each stick and look at them. Do they say 512 on? Put one back in (properly)and memtest it. Repeat. If it still doesn't work, find someone to blame.

 

[oynaz]

Start by resetting the BIOS. I strongly suspect this will fix the problem.