Thread: pc showing wroung memory ram

hey guys i got a problem eith my pc.i just installed a new hard drive and installed windows xp every thing works fine.it has two 256mb ram which means it should have 512ram.in the bios it shows me 512ram.but when the pc is booted up and i go into system properties it says 256mb ram.i've tryed erverything.i swicthed the memory stick into different slots and the same thing happens.my pc is a dell dimension 4600,pentium 4 processer,agp nvida geforce fx 5200 128mb and has four memory slots.so can u guys help me out plz i really need to solve this problem.

plz can i get a ans plz...

This question would be best answered by the people you bought the ram from or the company that made it.
But it sounds like you have a faulty stick of ram.

thx alot

Does maybe your motherboard only support 256mb? I doubt it but maybe, sounds like you have an old comp.

I have 4 gigs of ram :D

1. Are your sticks the same type? ex. pc5700 Make sure your new stick is the same type as your old one, otherwise it won't read.

2. Are they dual sticks or different single sticks? Sometimes PC have issues if they aren't dual.

3. If you can find or obtain the same type of stick type (example like in 1. PC5700 or whatever model it is you have) instead of using 2x512MB, just get a 1gb and you be better off since XP can use up to I think it was 6gb of ram.

It will read but it will downclock to the speed of the slower stick.

It could also be a faulty mobo.

if the bios reads it and the OS doesn't... are you using an integrated video adaptor on the motherboard instead of a separate (pci, agp, pci-e) video card? If so, the 256 megs is being taken by the video card most likely. If you have an integrated AND a pci/agp/pci-e board in, go into your bios and disable the onboard video. That should free up the memory.

another thing I would do is dump that ram totally, find the MAXIMUM ram you can stick in that system and get a dual-channel kit equalling out to that size at the proper speed from newegg. Ram is pretty cheap these days, and today's apps need a bit more ram than yesteryear. For instance firefox alone requires a quarter of your current memory just to start up.

Originally Posted by RabidWeezle2

For instance firefox alone requires a quarter of your current memory just to start up.

Which is the reason I switched to Lolifox, same exact browser less system resources.

Originally Posted by Arucardo

Which is the reason I switched to Lolifox, same exact browser less system resources.

oh nice in linux I use links2 for ultra fast browsing and dirt low resources.