I have an asus P4P800S motherboard with one 512mb DDR RAM PC 3200 memory. I recently purchased another of the same and installed it. the computer started I made no changes to bios and save changes and exit. I then let it load. When it had loaded I went into system and it detected that I now had 1GB of memory but the computer is now very unstable and prone to reset for no reason at all. Before this the computer was very reliable and stable. Is there a setting I have missed and need to change. Any help would be greatly appreciated. System Specs: Maxtor 120GB, Maxtor 80GB Hard Drives Pentium 4 2.66Ghz Processor Asus P4P800S Mother Board 512MB DDR RAM PC 3200 Memory 256MB Geforce FX5600 Graphics Card Windows XP SP2 Operating System

I'm not sure if that board supports dual memory controllers but if it does and the RAM isn't a perfect match maybe that could cause your problem. I would suggest pulling the original stick of RAM and see if the machine is still unstable. If so, your RAM may be defective. If not, try configuring for single channel memory and see if that helps. Probably iffy RAM.

I changed them over and the second one appears to work fine (my sister is playing the sims 2 that should test it out) now if that continues to work fine how do i single channel the memory

You need to look at the manual for the motherboard. The way you install the modules in the slots determines wheather it runs single or dual channel. I am not sure what you mean when you say you changed them over. Do you have both modules installed now?

Well i switched it with the original to see if the second one was faulty and it still worked fine. so then i put both back in and it still resets for no reason. so both memorys work fine by themself but problems when i try and use them at the same time. the manual says all you need is two memorys the same and you dont need to change any settings. how do i change it to single channel like you suggested first

As I said, you need to read the manual more carefully. There should be a diagram showing which pairs of slots will yield single channel.

i think i have solved the problem. it was a problem with XP SP2 once i took it off and put the ram in its works fine. thanks for your help