A few days ago I booted up and my Sysmetric gages show only about 300mb of memory available. I normally have 700mb of my 1gb card available after all my programs are fired up. I looked into my machine specs and sure enough it is showing 768mb of memory available. Everything worked ok and I could not find any oddball programs installed. This led me to (finally) upgrade my memory. After installing a matched pair of 1gb cards, I am still missing 256mb of memory. Any ideas? Thanks.
More computer specs would help, like do you have a video card or are you running on board graphics.
Also, try another gauge and see if it shows something different.
You're not being clear enough.
What do you mean by this?
And also this ?
It sounds like maybe you have a block of memory being reserved for video memory by a shared memory type of graphics setup. Have you run dxdiag? What does it show?
Does your system show 2 full GBs of installed memory?
Sorry about the lack of info. Here goes: When I had the 1gb card CCleaner, Auslogics Sys Info and any Sysmetric gage I used showed 1020mb of memory available. Then after a boot up one day all of the above showed 768mb memory available. The "matched pair" of 1gb memory cards are what Crucial.com called the units I bought. I have an HP Pavillion a1320n 2005 Media center edition, Pentium 4 CPU 3.06GHZ, with ATI Radeon Xpress 200 video card (intergrated). After the installation of the two 1gb cards all of the above programs show 1791mb of memory available. As does my system properties in Control panel. Virtual memory paging file set to 2560mb if it matters. Dxdiag shows 1792mb memory. Anything else I should look for in dxdiag? Thanks for the replies.
It's your onboard video card. Onboard video cards get their ram from your system ram, except in rare cases where some of them have some of their own ram. If you go into your bios or use some utility, you should be able to change the amount of ram allocated to your card.
Thanks mafutnyoas. I am still concerned that the memory size changed all of a sudden. I have had the computer about 3 years now. I try to watch my computer closely. I will look into the changing of the ram used by my card.
If you go into Control Panel and click on System this will bring up a System Properties panel. On the General tab it should show 2 GBs of Ram. When running dxdiag it should show on the system tab Memory: 2046MB RAM. If this is so, then I would say everything is fine.
I have a pc similiar to yours, it's an HP a1230N with an AMD processor and it's a 2005 Media Center Edition pc. It too has the ATI Radeon Xpress 200 video card. I haven't found anyway to disable it's taking a block of memory in the system bios on my machine. Given you have 1792 Ram available after bootup your fine.
However, if your machine is showing only 1792 Ram in System Properties instead of 2 GBs and/or in dxdiag as described above then it is not recognizing all of the installed memory in which case you should check what the Bios shows.
BigDogBigFeet, both system properties and dxdiag show 1792mb of memory. So if bios shows the "missing" memory is used by the video that would be a good thing, no? Like I stated originally, everything runs fine, actually even better with the memory upgrade. I was concerned with the sudden change as I am not wanting to refurbish or purchase a new computer at this time. This set up has no problem running anything I put in it game or program wise. Thanks again. Karma to you.
Check your bios settings. If you are using the Xpress 200 video then it will reserve memory for itself. I have installed a dedicated graphics card with its own memory so my system shows the full 2 GBs of memory. I am thinking that you should definitely find 2 GBs installed as reported in your Bios. If not then something is weird. It's the sudden change aspect that has me thinking something might be flaky with a Bios setting.
IF at one time it showed one amount, then all of a sudden did not show the same amount, I would sumise somthing is wrong with either the ram or the ram slot. if in system properties it is not showing the correct amount of ram " which it did before".
Even with Video delegated Ram the ram still will show in the system properties. My lap top has shared ram (512 meg) in it for the onboard Video but It still shows a full 4 gig installed within System properties.
Typically Bios does not keep the system from seeing Ram installed It just reserves it for preset uses.
As far as I remember, the only time Bios will report incorrect ram would be if it was designed that way from the begining.( it's not uncommon) In which case it would have never reported the proper amount to begin with.
Now, If you switched all ram cards then I would sumise it is possibly one of the Ram slots. If you are using the old ram as well it could be a bad card. The following steps will help you find or eliminate both possibilities.
To check Ram slots: Remove all but one card ( preferably one of the new ram cards),reboot and see if it lists proper amount of ram installed. if so move that ram card to the next slot, do so until you have tested all ram slots with the same ram card. If you find it shows incorrect amount of ram with one of the slots then it is a bad slot,and cant be fixed.
To check old ram : Now if all slots report the correct amount of ram and you are using one or more of the old ram, install one of the old ram cards. boot pc, if it lists the proper amount, that card is OK, do this for all old cards you are using.
I will gather you will either find a bad Ram card * yes they do die out after time* or possibly a bad ram slot. They too tend to give out in time. In some instances it could be both. You can use the bad slot * not recommended* but if you must, (I would recommend puting the bad card in it or the smallest ram card possible, if there are no bad cards) but it can have adverse issues by trying to run. especially when the PC tries to write/read to/from that perticular section of ram.
If by chance neither the ram nor slots are bad.. then you may try a CMOS battery. It may be getting weak and the bios could be misreporting the amount of ram installed. This is reaching for straws here but worth a try..other than that, I have no idea...
Hope this helps
HG_Eliminator thanks for the help. All 3 of the cards I now have, (original 1gb and two new 1gb cards) have been swapped in and out of each slot. All combinations of the 3 cards have been installed also. The results are the same regardless of which card(s) are in which slot(s). 767mb available when a single card is installed and 1791mb when any two cards are installed. Strange stuff indeed, no? As far as the battery suggestion goes I will assume the only battery seen inside is the one you speak of. I will get a replacement for that later. I am going to attempt the bios suggestion later also as the whole memory experiment took longer then I thought and I have a wedding to attend. Do you think they could have made it any harder to replace those cards? My thumbs are killing me. But the bar is free at the wedding and a few libations will cure that. Thanks again for the help.
Hey stu103 what you will be looking for is to verify it isn't a hardware problem in your Bios which should show the full 2 GB's of installed memory. If it isn't something strange has happened. Possibly a hardware problem as HG_Eliminator said.
I do know that for my HP Media Center PC there was a Bios Flash update that HP recommended maybe over one year ago. You'll find critical updates for your PC that are only available at HP Update and not available through MS Update. Check that out as well.
Good Luck.
Some memory sticks are not completely compatible with every motherboard. I myself had at one time installed 2GB of memory on my system and it turned out that the memory was not listed with the manufacturer of the motherboard as being compatible. Also there is an issue with 32bit operating systems and the allocation of the space. Your video card (especially onboard video) could also contribute to this.
Grab your dxdiag text file and post this here and let us take a look at it. After you open up dxdiag and after it has completly loaded click the button "save as text" and then post that info. Please.
You just update your ATI north/southbridge drivers??
That should only happen when you're using > 3 GB of memory. It shouldn't affect a system with 2 GB of memory.
Considering you lack of success resolving the issue, I suspect a hardware problem. Maybe one of the memory sticks is bad, or maybe something went bad on your motherboard. Or maybe the onboard video, as some suspect.
My suggestion is to test your memory to make sure your memory is good.
If your memory is good, I wouldn't worry about it.
The way I'm reading the OP's Reply #10, it's not a memory stick problem. Could still be a hardware problem in the memory slots/MB. I'm intersted in knowing if his Bios shows the full 2 GB's as installed. Might shed some more light on the problem.
Good morning to all. I have updated the ATI video drivers and all HP updates including the bios and now I find 1982mb of memory anywhere I look. I also found out that my HP updates had been turned off. How and when I do not know but I suspect that is where the problem came from, not getting the bios update. It was only after the bios update did the memory show the increased figure. I cannot thank every one who responded enough. I was fearful I was headed for a slow computer meltdown. This was my first post on the Stardock forums and I am amazed at the helpful and polite response I have received. It's 2:30 am here and I spent a lot of time at my niece's wedding party and I have a 8 am tee time so I am off to bed. Thanks again and karma for everyone.
Well, I'm glad to hear you've got it resolved to your satisfaction. The Bios was certainly the last remaining place for it to be a software problem which tends to be the easier problem to solve as compared to replacing a MoBo. Happy computing.
Good to hear you got it fixed! The BIOS probably just got reset or soemthing. Good to hear upgrading it fixed it.
It's certainly good when it turns out to be software rather than hardware .
always good to have something resolved before it starts a new page. Glad it was. And the stardock forums are a great place for help, unlike many other forums, the people here are far more polite than anywhere else on the net.
glad you were able to solve your pc problem
Well done folks. I love how the community pulls together to help out someone in need.
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