vista will not load with 4GB memory

[7kev]

I installed vista on my new M2N-SLI vista edition Asus motherbord with 2 X 1 Gigs Patiot XP 800MHz memory. Everything was great. Then I puchased 2 more 1gig sticks, except this was A-Data 800MHz. Vista failed to load in. I removed the A-Data memory and everything was fine. The A- data works fine by itself, or fine running one matched pair and a single of the other brand in the B2 memory slot. The 4 gigs were recongnized at post and in bios, but vista 32 will not load. I get a screen that asks to retry loadind windows or last known working, or safe mode or insert Vista disk and choose repair, ect... None of these work untill I take out the one stick.I have tried every configuration with the memory sticks. I know I should have bought matching memory, but do you think there is another problem?

 

[aximbigfan]

you cant have more then 3gb of ram with vista or any other 32bit version of windows for that matter.

in order to be able to have 4gb and up you need:
*a 64bit proc
*a 64bit os

the other thing is that you are trying to use un matched sticks. even though they are the same speed, they are by a differnt manufacturer and they prolly have a differnt cas latency.

when you do if you do get a 64bit setup, you need to have matched sticks. its not complety required, but having matched sticks does help sometimes.

 

[senor_bob]

You might want to try one of these Microsoft patches:
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/929777
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/930261/en-us
The second one is specific to nVidia chipsets.

Also, Vista (or XP) 32-bit will only recognize 3 gigs. But it should load anyway, just not see all the RAM.

 

[geofelt]

I have 4x1gb and run vista-32 with no problems. Vista/32 only recognizes about 3.3gb. Try running memtest to check out the memory. Some motherboards require not only the same speed, but also the same "type" of memory. I am not certain if this means the same chips, latency numbers, or whatever. You might also check to see if your motherboard has a bios update which might address the issue.

 

[darkstar782]

More than likely the issue is that the mb is reading the timings from the faster set of chips and applying that to the channel, while the slower memory cant cope with those speeds.

Manually set the timings to 5-5-5-15, and the voltage to 2.1v.

Boot to windows, look at the memory timings of each stick with CPU-Z.

Tweak the memory timings with Memset, and find the tightest stable timings with Orthos or similar loading the RAM.

Then set these timings in the BIOS.