Unsolved
This post is more than 5 years old
2 Posts
0
6130
November 8th, 2009 16:00
Dell Dimension 3000 (Ram upgrade issues)
Hi. Earlier today my sister had received 2 sticks of ram for her dell pc. Both sticks were 256mb a piece. There is only 2 slots total but I sent 2 sticks anyways incase one was faulty since they were just sitting around here for a while. So as I was talking her through the installation, she got the stick in and then booted the pc. I can't say 100% what the message was but it was something along the lines of: 256mb ram detected. Push F1 to continue, Push F2 to run the setup (BIOS). So I told her to push F2 to enter BIOS and she went under the memory config and told me she saw 512mb there. So she went out of that, rebooted the pc, and checked under the properties of "my computer" and saw that it only detected 256mb. I'm a little lost as to what is causing this and hope that someone here can clarify the issue for me. Thanks in advance.
RoHe
10 Elder
•
45.2K Posts
0
November 8th, 2009 16:00
It's possbie that the RAM isn't fully compatible with this system. Dell PCs can be very fussy about what RAM is used. The RAM should be either PC2700 (DDR 333-MHz) or PC3200 (DDR 400-MHz) . If the 2 new sticks are a matched pair, she should remove the original module and install the pair you gave her.
Are you sure you're not just seeing the amount of RAM that's "available" to Windows? Unless this system has an add-in PCI graphics card, some RAM is used for the on-board video, so less is available to Windows.
Ron
osprey4
4 Operator
•
34.2K Posts
0
November 8th, 2009 16:00
Hi, kayeye85:
What was in the computer before she added another 256MB? Do you know the exact specifications of the module she added?
kayeye85
2 Posts
0
November 8th, 2009 16:00
Yes the stick that was in there before adding the new stick was the original one. The two sticks I gave her are both 256mb pc3200. I will ask her to install both of the sticks and see where it goes from there. Thanks :)