- Mar 25, 2020
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This is a guide of methods that I have used to fix the problem where half of my RAM was not being utilized by my PC. There are probably things that I am missing in this guide, these are just the things that I tried.
1. Test to see if all of your RAM slots are working by seeing if your PC will boot with one RAM stick in the first slot, then the second, then the third, then the fourth. If you discover that some of your RAM slots are not functioning, it is likely a problem with your CPU. This was what was wrong with my PC, and I checked my CPU for any bent pins and loosened up how tight the CPU fan was to fix this. Be very careful while messing with the CPU, I would reccomend looking up a guide that goes into more detail before messing with the CPU at all.
2. Update your bios. It may be possible that your current bios update is conflicting with your RAM, so I would reccomend updating them to the latest update. For my Gigabyte board, I had to download the update from the website, put it on a flash drive, and then go into the bios in order to successfully update. This process is likely different depending on your motherboard brand.
3. Hit "win" + "r", type in "msconfig", go to "boot", click on "advanced options" and uncheck the box that says "maximum memory", then click "apply" and restart your pc. You can also get to msconfig by simply clicking on the windows button and typing in "msconfig".
4. Make sure that all of your RAM sticks individually do work by booting the pc with each stick indivisually.
5. Make sure that your RAM sticks are compatible in the first place. To do this, download Speccy and make sure that they are both DDR4 or DDR3 for example. DDR4 RAM does not work with anything other than DDR4 RAM. Also, based on my understanding, if you download CPU-Z and all of your RAM is recognized, this means that your RAM sticks are compatible. I am not 100% sure if this is always the case, but it is probably worth it to try.
That is everything that I tried over a period of two days to get my RAM to be completely usable and not "hardware reserved". I'm sure there are some things that I missed or explained poorly, so comment any extra advice if you want. Hopefully someone finds this thread useful.
1. Test to see if all of your RAM slots are working by seeing if your PC will boot with one RAM stick in the first slot, then the second, then the third, then the fourth. If you discover that some of your RAM slots are not functioning, it is likely a problem with your CPU. This was what was wrong with my PC, and I checked my CPU for any bent pins and loosened up how tight the CPU fan was to fix this. Be very careful while messing with the CPU, I would reccomend looking up a guide that goes into more detail before messing with the CPU at all.
2. Update your bios. It may be possible that your current bios update is conflicting with your RAM, so I would reccomend updating them to the latest update. For my Gigabyte board, I had to download the update from the website, put it on a flash drive, and then go into the bios in order to successfully update. This process is likely different depending on your motherboard brand.
3. Hit "win" + "r", type in "msconfig", go to "boot", click on "advanced options" and uncheck the box that says "maximum memory", then click "apply" and restart your pc. You can also get to msconfig by simply clicking on the windows button and typing in "msconfig".
4. Make sure that all of your RAM sticks individually do work by booting the pc with each stick indivisually.
5. Make sure that your RAM sticks are compatible in the first place. To do this, download Speccy and make sure that they are both DDR4 or DDR3 for example. DDR4 RAM does not work with anything other than DDR4 RAM. Also, based on my understanding, if you download CPU-Z and all of your RAM is recognized, this means that your RAM sticks are compatible. I am not 100% sure if this is always the case, but it is probably worth it to try.
That is everything that I tried over a period of two days to get my RAM to be completely usable and not "hardware reserved". I'm sure there are some things that I missed or explained poorly, so comment any extra advice if you want. Hopefully someone finds this thread useful.
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