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Dell Optiplex 320 ram upgrade problems
so this weekend i bought 2 pny - Optima 2GB pc2-6400 DDR2 Dimm memory when i installed both of them it goes to the bois (like normal) prompt of f1 (continue) or f2 (enter bios settings) and when i hit continue it fails to run, i looked into it further in the bios settings and noticed that the ram was at 3.5 GB when it should say 4 GB i also noticed that the speed is at 800 mhz witch is over the maximum speed, when i took one out and used the 2GB card and a 1/2 GB card it ran fine and was at the maximum speed but i also noticed that in bios it said it was at 2 GB instead of 2.5 GB, i am running windows vista, i would like to know A) what is happening to 1/2 GB of ram and B) is there anyway to fix this so i can use both 2 GB ram cards?
speedstep
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March 24th, 2014 11:00
The computer steals from system ram for the video.
There isn't any way to get that ram back.
Death Graves
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March 24th, 2014 18:00
@ speedstep
i did some further research and discovered that running vista 32 bit is only capable of 3 GB of ram and 64 bit is capable of 4 GB of ram if i update to 64 bit should that fix the issue and let me run with both 2 GB cards making a total of 4 GB of ram?
Death Graves
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March 25th, 2014 07:00
@ speedstep
or possibly could i turn up the amount of ram the video driver steals to 1GB of ram instead of 1/2GB of ram making the system use 3GB of ram (within widows vista 32-bit capability) to operate the system and 1 GB to run the graphics card, theoretically is this possible and if so is it theoretically able to work or am i going to upgrade to a 64 bit operating system? also when i was running off 2 512 mb ram cards making a sum total of 1GB of ram for the operating system the graphics driver didn't seem to steam any ram, why is that? but also when i was running of of 1GB the graphics drive crashed a lot is that because i was overtaxing it and it wasn't able to steal any ram to keep up? if so why didn't it steal any ram?