3 sticks of ram, 4 slots - placement?

grasshopper May 15, 2010 at 09:12:15

Video ram has nothing to do with system ram. How much is in it now?

worldlibrary May 15, 2010 at 09:29:43

Just taking a shot.... Two slots have white clips and two blue. Or any combination of two colors. In your case, the gold slots then one in the first black. Put the first two in the color coded slot on the left and the third in the second set of slots. Unless the ram is double sided and high density as your computer may except only one ram chip per every two slots. Hope that makes sense.... Do be sure the ram chips are identical or at least the same speed as the slower chip will take priority.

Right now I've got a 1 gb stick (all exactly the same) in each of the 4 slots. Windows only recognizes 3 gb of RAM. The guy in the shop said it was because the max is 4 and 1 is being taken up by my video card. There's nothing bad about leaving all 4 in, but I'd like to remove one if it's not doing any good. It sounds like I need to use both yellow slots and the black closest to the processor. I should empty the furthest black, if any.

Rockthecasbah May 16, 2010 at 17:19:36

I think Video memory only adds with System memory if it is onboard grahpics. Windows XP only recognizes a maximum of 4 GB of memory. However, this INCLUDES the virtual memory used by the pagefile system. Check your pagefile size - if you add this to the number reported by system properties, it should total your 4 GB. I'd recommend turning off virtual memory/pagefile system on your system with 4 GB of physical memory: 1. Start the Control Panel System applet (go to Start, Settings, Control Panel, and click System). 2. Select the Advanced tab. 3. Under the Performance section, click Settings. 4. Select the Advanced tab. 5. Under the Virtual Memory section, click Change. 6. Select No Paging File and click Set. 7. Click OK. Also, keep in mind...When a video game needs more memory, it will use the system RAM via AGP Aperture Size or PCI-E addressing. Can read http://photography-on-the.net/forum... for more info on this. But i would recommend keeping all 4gigs.

Thanks. The way I'm figuring it's finding 3 gigs of RAM is by the General tab in System Properties. After reading that post you linked, I have to wonder if taking out a stick would make that number drop to 2. Like 1 gig just isn't showing up because it's reserved for all of my devices.