older hp pavillion upgrades a6234x showing 6gb ram only 3.5 usable

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racesrc

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hello all, i have a hp pavillion a6234x that i purchased cheap last year for itunes, hi rez audio and google chrome web browsing. like i said...cheap. it had an upgraded 1tb sata hard drive 3gb ram and core 2 duo e4500 cpu and a p5lp-le leonite2-gl8e MB running windows vista 32bit home. graphics card, audio card all stock. i since did a fresh install of windows 7 64 bit professional and swapped the 2- 500mb ram sticks with 2- 2gb ram sticks giving me 6gb of ram, the issue is obviously the same problem i have read in plenty of forums but not a fix for it, shows 6gb memory but 3.5 usable. my bios does not have a remapping setting my msconfig advanced max mem setting have been unchecked, does anyone know what the fix may be. it has to be a windows 7 setting that fixes the issue, i would think the hardware should not care. hp's site shows that unit has a maximum of 4gb ram but they are basing that off of windows vista home 32bit OS which has that 4gb limit. yes the 4gb ram i added is a higher speed 6400 than the 5300 that the other sticks are, i have read that shouldn't matter to usable ram just the speed would not exceed 5300. i am perplexed.i am upgrading the core 2 duo e4500 to a core 2 duo e6700 cpu because of the $26 price tag ( i am 51 by the way with a bad heart and a lot of med bills ) so i can't afford a new tower or a better upgrade for this than what i have mentioned here, and for my purposes this will suffice, including all upgrades total cost would be $175ish. i am sorry for the lengthy Q, however i wanted to make sure all the info was here. i am a newby to computers, but i am learning. any help would be gratefully appreciated. thank you all
 
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scottiemedic
I would put money that 4GB is the most RAM the boards chipset will allow. There are various monitoring programs online that will report what chipset is in your machine. Then you can look up on google or http://ark.intel.com the RAM limitations for said chipset. ie I have a Z68 Gigabyte board, the chipset only allows 16GB max, but if I had a Z77 or 87, you can go up to 32GB. My old Dell laptop has a 945 chipset and 4GB is the max the 945 chipset will take.
The chipset has more to do with it than Windows. Analogy - you can't drive 4 cars side by side on a residential 2 lane road, not enough lanes. Just like the chipset may only have lanes for 4GB, or 8, or 16, yada yada. Hopefully I put it well enough. So find the chipset and you'll have...
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scottiemedic

scottiemedic

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I would put money that 4GB is the most RAM the boards chipset will allow. There are various monitoring programs online that will report what chipset is in your machine. Then you can look up on google or http://ark.intel.com the RAM limitations for said chipset. ie I have a Z68 Gigabyte board, the chipset only allows 16GB max, but if I had a Z77 or 87, you can go up to 32GB. My old Dell laptop has a 945 chipset and 4GB is the max the 945 chipset will take.
The chipset has more to do with it than Windows. Analogy - you can't drive 4 cars side by side on a residential 2 lane road, not enough lanes. Just like the chipset may only have lanes for 4GB, or 8, or 16, yada yada. Hopefully I put it well enough. So find the chipset and you'll have an answer. Sometime Device Manager will also report the chipset from the driver installed or the support site will say it in the driver name or description.

OH, also make sure the e6700 has the same socket and bus speed (800MHz, 1066MHz, etc) on ARK and make sure there isn't a BIOS limitation on what chips can go in that board. If the BIOS doesn't have 6700 CPU info written into it, it won't work unless you want to install a hacked BIOS.

Good Luck, let us know if you need help finding the chipset or CPU info after you get the version you have.
 
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racesrc

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Manufacturers website lists 945g chipset 4gb max ram, so yes you are correct sadly since I already installed 6gb. and it will accept the 1066 bus speed of the cpu I ordered, which was also listed on HP's website as an upgrade cpu for the mobo. Thank you, that answers that. It had 3gb before I swapped out the 2 500mb sticks for 2gb sticks, so it is alittle better now, should be enough after I swap the cpu to do what I need until I find a newer used tower. I am learning a lot so I appreciate everyone's help thank you.
 
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racesrc

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odd though that the core 2 duo e6700 i just purchased is 1066mhz but the core 2 duo e4500 thats in the pc right now is 800mhz and both ark.intel and HP say this is a viable swap as well as the folks at starmicroinc.net hope it works
 
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scottiemedic

scottiemedic

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Congrats, glad you got it worked out. Let us know if you have issues with the CPU. Might want to flash your BIOS to the latest for compatibility reasons.

And it's not totally odd about the 1066 FSB. A lot of boards and (more likely) the manufacturer (HP) used the board but put a lower grade CPU in to start with to shave bucks off production and affordability for Joe Consumer. A 945 chipset should have no problems with the FSB at 1066 either.
 
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racesrc

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Mar 20, 2014
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you have been extremely helpful. thank you. i will respond after i install the cpu, should be tuesday or wednesday. i already installed whatever i could find as far as updates to the bios from hp's website, ( i think?!?! ).
 
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