Two 1gb Crucial Ballistix sticks

[DocHolliday2]

Well, I already had 2gig in, and I got 2 more gig of Crucial Ballistix for my custom build.

I decided to test it in my good ol' dell XPS410.

When I had all 4 sticks in, it at first wouldnt boot up. Then I took the two Crucial Ballistix out, and it worked fine. Then I put one stick back in, great, found it, booted up.

So I decided to take and put both in again. Bam, it started up with 4gb installed, but when I checked windows experience index, it still said 3070mb. So I decided to take out the 4th stick and call newegg tomorrow for rma. The wierd thing is, when I started the computer up after I took it out, it told me there was a difference in the installed Ram. So I checked windows experience index again to find 3070mb!

Is it just my Windows vista x32 edition blocking all 4gig? Btw, when I took the last stick out, it smelt off. (Yes I smelled it to see if it fried) But that might just be because it was warm.

Thanks for the always fast responses!
Joe

 

[Mr Fox]

Originally posted by: DocHolliday2
Well, I already had 2gig in, and I got 2 more gig of Crucial Ballistix for my custom build.

I decided to test it in my good ol' dell XPS410.

When I had all 4 sticks in, it at first wouldnt boot up. Then I took the two Crucial Ballistix out, and it worked fine. Then I put one stick back in, great, found it, booted up.

So I decided to take and put both in again. Bam, it started up with 4gb installed, but when I checked windows experience index, it still said 3070mb. So I decided to take out the 4th stick and call newegg tomorrow for rma. The wierd thing is, when I started the computer up after I took it out, it told me there was a difference in the installed Ram. So I checked windows experience index again to find 3070mb!

Is it just my Windows vista x32 edition blocking all 4gig? Btw, when I took the last stick out, it smelt off. (Yes I smelled it to see if it fried) But that might just be because it was warm.

Thanks for the always fast responses!
Joe

Need More Info on the build.... also you are running into 32Bit O/S limitations... but to diagnose hardware need to know what is there....

 

[DocHolliday2]

I don't know anything about the computer except it's a standard Dell XPS410, I was just testing this Ram for my upcoming build.

If I run CpuZ, will it still find it even though it aint working?

Muew... I'll just swap the Ram with the working ram to see if it works tomorrow... What would it hurt?

 

[Duwelon]

3 1GB sticks would be 3096, so maybe your 3070 number is 3096 with 26 MB shaved off because vista or your bios is reserving some?

My 2GB of ram on Vista x64 shows as 2046MB even though it's actually 2048MB. Something is reserving the other 2MB.

In any case, you will never get the full 4GB out of Vista 32bit. It will use roughly 3.5GB and thats it. Of course 3.5GB is still better than 3 so it's up you if it's worth having half a gig go unused.

 

[DocHolliday2]

Will it still use half of a 1gig stick? or does it need to be 512?