Why would windows only recognise half a stick or RAM?

Why would windows only recognise half a stick or RAM?

I was at the in-laws over the weekend and one of the machines was reported as having got much slower recently. After some investigation it seemed that windows was reporting only 384mb of ram, and this was most likely the culprit for the slowness. I opened up the machine to see what ram it took and it had 2 slots, both with 256mb sticks in them.

Asked by: Guest | Views: 424

Total answers/comments: 4

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Guest [Entry]

I'd guess that some of the ram has been allocated for use by the graphics card. It's usually a setting in the BIOS

Guest [Entry]

"Has the full amount of RAM been recognised in the past and only now stopped being seen?

If it has not recognised it all for all time, then it could be a strange chipset limitation on the motherboard - does the full amount of RAM appear during the power-on-self-test phase? Is it listed in the BIOS setup screen? If not, check to see that you have the latest BIOS for that model.

It might help to provide a little more detail in your question:

the mothboard made+model and chipset (these are probably presented in the BIOS setup screens)
the Windows version and service pack level (in most Windows variants the winver command will tell you this)"

Guest [Entry]

I've seen this once, and in that particular case the memory was clock at a higher speed than the motherboard would deal with. But other than that I have no idea why that might be the case.

Guest [Entry]

"I have had machine in the past that have limitations on the amount of addressable memory. An old HP had exactly the same problem - regardless of what amount of memory I put in, it would never see more than 384MB.

I would guess that it's a limitation of the motherboard, and don't think it's a windows limitation - check the BIOS to see how much it's actually recognizing."