Memory Instability When Not Limited To 512mb

[Meanrock_D]

My System:

XP Home, 2002 edition, Service Pack 3
Asus MB
Intel Core 2 Duo (E7400)
2x 1024 DDR2 RAM (unsure of manufacturer)
Western Digital 250GB HD, This is the windows install.
Western Digital 750GB HD
Nvidia GeForce 7600 GS
Samsung Super Writemaster, TSSTcorp SH-S223F Disc Drive

The problem is that when I have windows boot as normal, most programs run with errors, graphical artefacts and random crashes. Not all, but most. Additionally, any unzipping/unraring processes inevitably have corrupted files unless the zip/rar is only a few mb in size.

When I was having some problems installing Company of Heroes patches, I was recommended to limit my memory in MS config to 512 to stop any errors in addition to stopping all non-windows programs booting at startup. I discovered this fixed all problems that I knew of with games and programs.

I'm not very well off financially, so I really don't want to have to fork out for new RAM (cheap as it may seem to you, I just don't have a spare $100 after rent and food). I'm hoping it's something simple that I've just missed, considering that nothing actually seems to be broken.

Now that I'm starting to use this PC more, I'd like to know why I'm having these problems and any help would be greatly appreciated.

What I've tried so far: I've re-slotted the memory a few times. I've used Memtest86+ on both sticks individually and together for at least 3 hours each (no errors reported). I've edited the CPU settings in BIOS, testing with ASUS speed-limiting and various other energy conservation tech on and off in various combinations. I've updated the drivers for basically everything I could find. (I'm pretty sure I have anyway, ASUS has a really poor driver site).

The only thing that seems to work is to set MAXMEM=512 in msconfig.

[Sodde]

Could you give some more details of the type of errors you get and the details of each that you see as they appear on the screen?

[patio]

Reset the BIOS back to default settings.

[Meanrock_D]

Could you give some more details of the type of errors you get and the details of each that you see as they appear on the screen?

The types of errors I get are fairly diverse. The most noticeable are:

- Mozilla simply refusing to run, quitting almost instantly when started.

- Games either do not run at all (torchlight is a good example, can't get past the initial splash screen), or run with severe graphical glitches such as textures corrupting over a period of time, or not appearing at all (Plants vs Zombies, Peggle etc.). Funnily enough, more advanced games such as Dawn of War II and Call Of Duty: WaW never suffer these problems, or at the very most crash slightly more often.

- When unzipping/unrarring files, the error is always "FILENAME is broken or corrupted" at the end of the process, and seems to affect a random set of files, with no particular pattern to the kind of file that "breaks" in each attempt.

- Additionally, the computer seems to be extremely fond of running Check Disk when I reboot after any session of using my full RAM. It always find a couple files and sectors to fix as well (again, with no apparent rhyme or reason to the faults).

So, just a whole lot of system instability. I'm not really sure which faults are the most pertinent, and because there are so many, I'm not sure which would be the best to recreate for fault-report-copying purposes.

[Meanrock_D]

Reset the BIOS back to default settings.

I'll do that when I get home. I have to come to a friends to use the internet, so I may be a while between replies.

Thanks to both of you for your help so far, I am exceedingly grateful.

[Meanrock_D]

Sorry for the long delay between replies.

I've tried the suggested, and still nothing so far, the system isn't responding to any any BIOS changes in a positive manner.