Where's the rest of the RAM?

[8eg]

Sooooo, I just installed a second stick of RAM in my parents' computer. It's an old Slot A Athlon with 650MHz, and now it has 2 x 256MB PC133 RAM DIMMs. According to both the Windows 2k control panel and the BIOS at startup, I have 327MB of RAM. So where's the rest of it? How can I get the compy to recognize that it has 512MB of RAM?

 

[drwngflies]

What are the speeds of both sticks of RAM? Are they the same?(pc2100, pc3200, etc.)
If they are mismatched, the M/B will slow one down to match the slower RAM.
Also, which ports are the RAM plugged into? 1 & 2, 1 & 3, etc.?
Sounds as if the BIOS is only reading one side of the second stick.
Are they both DIMM?

 

[mwmorph]

do yuo have onboard video?

 

[8eg]

Sounds like I need to make myself clearer.

The motherboard is a MSI MS-6191, the processor is a Slot A Athlon (650 MHz.) The motherboard, according to the manual, supports 2 DIMMs of PC100 SDRAM, up to 256MB per DIMM.

(That's right. No DDR. This thing is OLD.)

It had 1 DIMM in it before (256 MB PC133 ,) and now it has two. They are identical in speed and size. When the MB had just one of them, it read the 256MB just fine. Now, it should be reading 512 MB, but it's only reading 327.

The motherboard doesn't have onboard video support (strangely enough.) Therefore, one must install a video card to get any use out of it. Currently it has a geforce 5200.

I am guessing that the problem is something that can be fixed by changing the BIOS settings, but that is something I don't have much experience with.

 

[imported_Kensai]

Are they both double sided?

 

[DaveSimmons]

Sounds like the second stick is only seen by the motherboard as 128 MB because it is high density / double sided.

Low density RAM is expensive these days, so it might be most cost-effective to just live with the stick only being half-seen. Just run memtest to make sure it's not defective.

 

[8eg]

Both DIMMs are double-sided, yes. However, the newer one is lower-profile. It has fewer chips, but they're larger than the chips on the old one, and they're mounted lengthwise on the DIMM.

How do I run memtest?

EDIT: Google is my friend. Downloading memtest now.