Not able to upgrade to 3 or 4 gig mem

Toggle sidebar Toggle sidebar
B

bennieblanco

Distinguished
Jul 10, 2007
10
0
18,510
I just purchased new machine
AMD Athlon 64 x2 Dual Core 4400+ 2.3 GHz
Acer Aspire E3800 build in 2 1gig PC4300 DDR2 memory sticks (Acer brand)
with option to upgrade to 4gig max
MB em61sm/em61pm
OS Vista Home Premium 32-bit

on MB itself see this
HT-200 MCP61PM-AM rev 1.0a

so I purchased Kingston 2x1gb PC5300 667 MHz DDR2

I placed both sticks in and computer started beeping consistently and did not boot up. I took 1

out and booted up but system is not recognizing the extra 1gig
I went in BIOS still same thing 2gig only
I switched the old memory for new one everything works so it is not memory issue but still

showing only 2gig
I changed slots and position no chance

searched forums since 6pm and few people recommending memory remapping which I do not have as an

option in my BIOS.
BIOS updated to lattes version still no additional options

so please if you have any idea how to do this help me
 
Check your motherboard specs and see if it is capable of running the different sets of RAM at the same time.

ie: PC4300 and you purchased PC5300

usually you can, the motherboard will slow down the faster RAM to match the slower, but given the recent advances in RAM technology this may not be possible anymore.
 
no motherboard specs ,. I just called Acer and they say they do not send to issue these. so do you think that if I downgrade to pc4300 all rams it shold be ok??
 
I also have pc 3200 512 dram , when I insert that one comuter beeps again so
original 2gig and 512 ddr no way, not booting up and beeping
original 2gig and 2x1 ddr2 5300 no way, not booting up and beeping
original 2gig and 1 ddr2 5300 extra gig not visible
new 2gig and 1old ddr2 4300 extra gig not visible
 
You cannot use DDR and DDR2 together even if your motherboard has both types of slots.

Mixing different DDR2 sticks should be avoided whenever possible.

You can usually use 2 identical pairs of RAM as long as you use the correct slots for Dual Channel -- check your motherboard manual.

Good luck :-D
 
ok guys you are more advanced than me
@ linux_0 thank you god to know

@evongugg I have no idea what you mean
do I need to increase the minimum somwhere ? if yes, where should I look for it in BIOS?


alos how do I reset the memory?


thank you
 
For best results AMD AM2 needs DDR2-800 PC2-6400 however it will work with slower RAM at reduced performance.

Keep in mind that some motherboards are very picky about what kind of RAM you can use.

Some motherboard manufacturers ( such as ASUS and others ) prove a QVL ( Qualified Vendors List ) which is a list of RAM that was tested and is known to work with a specific board.

For example here is a QVL for a randomly chosen motherboard from ASUS

http://dlsvr03.asus.com/pub/ASUS/mb/socketAM2/M2N32-SLI%20Deluxe/M2N32-SLI_Deluxe_Wireless_Edition_QVL.zip

This particular board will work with DDR2-533 DDR2-667 and DDR2-800 all are 240pin by the way.

184pin DDR will NOT work with AM2.

Hope this helps :-D
 
well it seems that mine works only with pc2 4200 533 which is hard to belive but no choice

thank you for the info
now since I use vista and few people say that it will not recognise over 3gig anyway what do you think I should do ?


thank you
 
Well, here's the deal:

You probably are using DDR1 (the PC4300) and DDR2 (PC2-5300) at the same time. That's a BIG no-no.

As linux_0 said, you can't do that. Either use one or the other. Not both.

I'm willing to guess that your motherboard has two DDR1 slots and two DDR2 slots.

The only way you're going to get 4 GB of RAM out of your existing setup is to use two 2 GB RAM sticks either in the DDR1 slots OR two 2 GB RAM sticks in the DDR2 slots.

You CANNOT get your system to run 4 GB of RAM using four 1 GB RAM sticks unless you have four DDR1 slots or four DDR2 slots.

EDIT: The page Linux just quoted refers to this:

256MB DDR2 533/667/800 SDRAM, 4 DIMM slots, Maximum 4GB

This seems to imply that there are DDR2 slots only. If that's the case, I'm wrong about not being able to get to 4 GB of RAM by using 1 GB RAM sticks. Even then, I would stick to the same make/model to avoid anything weird..
 
Enabling the memory hole or 4GB remapping in the BIOS should show all 4GB if using the appropriate DDR2 240pin DIMMS.

Linux and BSD will see and be able to use all 4GB as long as the BIOS shows all 4GB.

On windows it varies because the OS cannot always see all the RAM.
 
@ linux_0

"Enabling the memory hole or 4GB remapping in the BIOS should show all 4GB if using the appropriate DDR2 240pin DIMMS"


that is exacly what I was looking for but there is no such seting in my BIOS
it does look like I would need all 4gig to be pc2 4200 or pc2 5300

the spces for the memory say that it is compatible with pc 4200

I fund a great deal 1gig 39$ and will purchase 2 more , shame no 4200 for this price and none at that store.


I will try to upgrade late evening and will post back
hopefully with god news

thank you guys you where great help
 
ok guys. even the specs say it is pc2 4200 it end up being pc2 5300 so the ones I purchased fit perfectly. the problem was BAD MEMORY SLOTS. I had to exchange the computer , placed new memory and reads 4gigs. Even though Vista sees only 3313 I am happier than before

if you know solution how to see the remaining ram please reply

thank you for all your help
 
hehehe I woul love to but I work mainly with DW and PSD C2 I dont know how compatible programs are with Linux and I have to test all browsers , web design
 
Adobe CS2 runs on Linux

I believe some versions of DreamWeaver do too.

You should be able to use WINE ( free ) or

http://www.codeweavers.com/products/cxoffice/

which is commercial.

Or you can run windows under Linux or BSD.

Good luck 😀
 
Another thing no one has mentioned is that even if you get all four sticks to work, you OS will not reconised the 4 gigs, most likely only 3 since you are runing a 32 bit OS.
 
Even 64 bit version of Vista may not recognize 4gigs of ram right off the bat, you have to search microsofts site for a patch that you apply after you install vista but before you install more than 2 gigs of ram. Otherwise you'll get safe mode at best.

MS in thier wisdom released on OS that in theory can handle 100's of gigs of ram. But the reality is out of the box its pregimped at just under 3.
 


Windows cannot see the full 4GB because it's already been allocated. The memory is USED, just not seen.
 


Not correcting you, just pointing out why Windows 32-bit can't SEE but can USE 4GB of memory.

On a system configured with 4 GB of random-access memory (RAM), Microsoft® Windows® reports 3.0 to 3.8 GB of available memory. The same behavior is seen in Linux and other operating systems, as this is a limitation of 32-bit addressing used in IA-32 systems.

This is a limitation of a 32-bit architecture. The system can only address 4 GB of allocated memory. Allocated memory is made up of physical RAM, and any I/O space needed by devices. The way memory is allocated is that starting at 4 GB, the system allocates device I/O addresses working its way down. Normally this is not a problem, but when systems have 4 GB of physical memory, the addresses needed to address RAM overlap the space needed for I/O. In this case, the need for I/O space takes precedence, and the amount of RAM visible to the operating system and applications is limited to 4 GB minus I/O space. Examples of devices that consume I/O space are:

System BIOS
PCI Express configuration space and memory for PCI Express device(s)
Memory mappy I/O
Motherboard Resources (I/OxAPIC)
Chipset
PCI Enumeration

For example: If you have 4GB of system memory, an Intel 915g Express chipset, Windows XP with Service Pack 2, and a PCI Express graphics card the remaining system memory as reported by System Information would be ~3.25GB. The same configuration but with 2GB of system memory would result in all 2GB being available. This is due to the limited capability of memory mapping (or limited amount of addresses) on 32-bit architecture systems.

So in short, 4GB's is used, just not seen.
 


Are you talking about RAM or memory address space?

It can handle the full 4GB memory address space. The portion of RAM that is hidden behind MMIO, is neither seen nor used.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.

TRENDING THREADS

Latest posts

Moderators online

Share this page

COMPANY
RESOURCES
FOLLOW
Top Bottom