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Weird problem with 4Gb in E1705

post #1 of 10
10/5/07 at 8:06am
Thread Starter 
This week I finally made the choice to get 2x2G sticks for my E1705. They arrived today and I installed them as soon as I could.

But unfortunately Windows XP Pro SP2 wouldn't start completely (it froze somewhere in the screen with the logo and the moving bar underneath). Windows does start in dafe mode and reports 3.25G.

The funny thing is, Mac OS X does load completely and run without a problem. I even mentions 4G installed.

I did a quick memtest and the sticks seem to be ok. I changed the order of the sticks and no difference.

Does anyone have experience with this? Is there a setting I need to change on my Windows. Or would I need to reinstall it (doesn't seem logical).
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post #2 of 10
10/5/07 at 9:44am
E1705's only support 3.25GB of RAM, the other 750MB goes toward something else which I don't recall. For this reason I just got 3GB of RAM, which is close enough for me. Try starting your system with just one of your 2GB sticks installed. Better yet, if you still have a spare 512MB or 1GB stick, stuff one of those in there with the 2GB stick and see what happens. In a year or two, 3GB of RAM may be the norm. Right now though, it's overkill. You won't have any issues selling that other 2GB stick if you end up needing to get rid of it.
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post #3 of 10
10/5/07 at 11:06am
have you the latest BIOS from Dell ?

The memory should work fine, yes you will only be able to access 3.25 GB under windows, but that in itslelf should not cause any boot up problems.

Try using one stick at a time.
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post #4 of 10
10/5/07 at 11:18am
Thread Starter 
I do have the latest BIOS, and the problem is quite strange. I have tried one stick at a time and have found the following.

one stick works fine, the other fails to boot windows. It does boot the bios or OS X. The non-booting stick is running memtest for a few hours now, and hasn't turned up any errors.

The sticks come from a dual-channel kit and should therefor be the same, still one works and the other doesn't.
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post #5 of 10
10/5/07 at 11:22am
Then I would say the memory has a problem, get it exchanged.

If the other stick fails to boot windows it's not working correctly.
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post #6 of 10
10/5/07 at 1:28pm
Thread Starter 
I am thinking of getting it replaced, but since I cannot do that right now, I might as well do some testing.

The stick seems to boot anything but the currently installed windows. It boots a liveCD, it boots a BartPE windows version.

Right now I'm trying to install a clean windows on a 'spare' partition to see if that does boot. Installation is running now, and so far it seems to work.

The thing that bugs me though is that memtest finds no errors on the stick. If windows doesn't boot the stick should be broken and produce errors, right?
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post #7 of 10
10/5/07 at 5:06pm
Memory can be funny at times, might work on somethings then crash or not work in others ,get errors in some tests yet be perfectly stable for everything else its a crapshoot .'

Your doing the right thing though buy trying a fresh install of windows because if i had those types of signs like osx boots, no errors in memtest that would be the first thing it tried as well. good luck
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post #8 of 10
10/5/07 at 5:13pm
The shit we will go through to have our rigs running at peak performance...
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post #9 of 10
10/15/07 at 11:26am
Thread Starter 
Well, I contacted the store and finally got auth to send them back. Wrote down my long story about all the tests I did and included more details than they would probably like.

Just received a message, they concluded one was broken and will replace both.

Now I hope they will send them soon and that the next set does work...
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post #10 of 10
10/15/07 at 2:22pm
Nice that you got it to work. There have been a few threads lately about weird ram.

*Whats going on RAM companies*?
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