RAM not recognised by Windows

[Guest]

Help please - I have a Home PC with 1Gb of RAM. BIOS recognises it.
"System" in Control Panel recognises it. However when using "My Computer
Information - General", it shows only 256 Mb of RAM, which is strange as I
have 2x512Mb of RAM!
System is not handling larger programs as well as I would hope which is why
I investigated.
Any thoughts welcome.
Thanks

 

[Ken Blake, MVP]

Help please - I have a Home PC with 1Gb of RAM. BIOS recognises it.
"System" in Control Panel recognises it. However when using "My
Computer Information - General", it shows only 256 Mb of RAM, which
is strange as I have 2x512Mb of RAM!

This is a known bug, but only a cosmetic one that doesn't affect
performance. The report in My Computer is just wrong.. If it shows 1GB in
Control Panel | System, it's all being recognized and used.

System is not handling larger programs as well as I would hope which
is why I investigated.
Any thoughts welcome.

This isn't the reason. What do you mean by "System is not handling larger
programs as well as I would hope"? For more help with this, please post back
with more specifics.

 

[Guest]

Well the PC had been tending to freeze during programs that my daughter likes
such as Sims2 with the expansion packs .. which require 256Mb and
rollercoaster tycoon 3 which ideally requires 384Mb in XP ...... so logic (or
my version of logic anyway!) made me think that there may be some RAM issues.
However I guess not, so it may just be that she has been running several
things at once and so hit the problem (and not thought to tell me!).

Thank you so much for the info about the known error, it has really set my
mind at rest as the company that sold me the PC tried to tell me I had to
reformat the disk and reinstall Windows from scratch!!

Thanks once again Ken, your help has been much appreciated

 

[Ken Blake, MVP]

Well the PC had been tending to freeze during programs that my
daughter likes such as Sims2 with the expansion packs .. which
require 256Mb and rollercoaster tycoon 3 which ideally requires 384Mb
in XP ...... so logic (or my version of logic anyway!) made me think
that there may be some RAM issues. However I guess not, so it may
just be that she has been running several things at once and so hit
the problem (and not thought to tell me!).

Thank you so much for the info about the known error, it has really
set my mind at rest as the company that sold me the PC tried to tell
me I had to reformat the disk and reinstall Windows from scratch!!

Ouch! Unfortunately, that's the standard reaction of incompetant tech
support people at many such companies. If they don't know what's wrong, they
tell the customer to reformat and reinstall.

Thanks once again Ken, your help has been much appreciated

You're welcome, Richard. Glad to help.