4 gigs showing as 2

[howlingwolf]

Alright so recently I bought 2 - 2gig sticks of ram. But when I put them into my computer it only shows 2 gigs of ram. I thought it may be Xp causing the trouble so I upgraded to vista. But when I got it installed and running it still only shows me as running 2 gigs of ram. I thought it may be seeing each stick as a 1 gig stick so I took one out and it still showed 2 gigs of ram. Does anyone have any ideas on how I can get both stick to show up so I can have all 4 gigs of ram? Thank you.

[mcf747]

Ok there is a really and I mean really.............................long story behind this. Long and short is that 32bit XP and Vista can only support up to 4 gigs of ACCOUNTED ram total. Now the ram your video card has counts towards this 4 gigs and also your motherboard configuration can also screw with numbers whether the memory is dual channel and how it supposed to be configured.

Who manufactures your motherboard and what model is it?

If anyone is interested I will post back with more details in a bit I have to go back into my records and find the info.

[mcf747]

Hers the detailed article I was talking about:
http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/000811.html

[Lupua]

Add to this story the upgrad the BIOS possibility as he/she doesn't indicate if this is a machine originally designed for the XP then Vista systems howlingwolf is running.  I knew someone once who tried installing more RAM on an old early Win98 machine and quickly hit the BIOS limitations problem.  Simply put, at the time the machine was produced having that much (i.e., how much we have today) of anything wasn't anticipated by the machine makers, so they saved a few bucks and lines of code by not bothering to teach the BIOS how to deal with numbers that big.  It is very possible that if the machine in question falls into that category a BIOS patch is available from either the maker, or after market. 

[mcf747]

Very good point it could be the BIOS.

How old is your machine?
Manufacture and model?

[patio]

Add to this story the upgrad the BIOS possibility as he/she doesn't indicate if this is a machine originally designed for the XP then Vista systems howlingwolf is running.  I knew someone once who tried installing more RAM on an old early Win98 machine and quickly hit the BIOS limitations problem.  Simply put, at the time the machine was produced having that much (i.e., how much we have today) of anything wasn't anticipated by the machine makers, so they saved a few bucks and lines of code by not bothering to teach the BIOS how to deal with numbers that big.  It is very possible that if the machine in question falls into that category a BIOS patch is available from either the maker, or after market. 

If this machine is running XP this scenario is highly unlikely...

[Broni]

Vista will show RAM in vicinity of 3 gig, even, if 4 gig are installed, but it's not the issue here, since it shows straight 2gig.

[bartrob]

this could be a simple one  how many ram slots are there in your mother board if you have four then the problem could be that you are using slots 1 and 2 when slots 1 and 3 should be used this is a problem i have encountered before and it iwll only use slots 2 and 4 if 1 and 3 are filled up