Another hardware reserved memory issue

sergii

Prominent
Oct 22, 2017
2
0
520
Hello guys. I know it's a pretty common problem here, but I've made a lot of research before and none of those solutions helped me, so I made the another post.

My school provided me with a fresh 64-bit Windows10 Education (I assume this is the same as Enterprise), which I have installed on my potato. Everything seems to be fine except one issue. As the title says, in the task manager I see this:
0o2ZGf4.png


So, windows actually recognizes that I have 8Gib of RAM in total, however it uses only 4 of it.
Before that I've been running different older Win oses as well as linux, all of them used the whole memory.

To make sure all my RAM sticks are fine, I've made 8 passes in Memtest86++ - no errors.
Many people suggest checking Windows booting conf through msconfig. There, memory limitation's unchecked, so it doesnt seem to be Windows that holds up the RAM. Also, some say memory might be reserved for integrated video chip, which is untrue in my case as my CPU simply doesn't have one.

I suppose it's something with BIOS. Before installing windows, I ejected the CMOS battery to reset my previous overclocking options. Might there be any option in BIOS that limits the RAM by default? Didn't find anything related to that.
My current BIOS version is v1.10 (the latest update from MSI was v1.A, so it's the same but in hex, riiight?).

My specs are the following:

  • MB: MSI m55h-e33
    CPU: Intel Xeon x3440
    RAM: some kingston 2Gib sticks x 4 with the clock rate of 1333 Mgh
    Graphics: MSI radeon HD7850 2Gb
    120 Gib SSD and 1TB HDD from Western Digital (just in case)

Did I mess it up in BIOS or what else can cause this issue? I know there's a ton of factors but most of them related to memory's hardware malfunction, but in that case tools like memtest would recognize it, right?

What else would you suggest me to solve this problem? I really need that memory, because now this issue makes my yet-not-so-powerful PC even worse.


 
Solution
I was pretty sure that my RAM cards sit in place tight and didn't even make any attempt to check. But now I decided to dig into the case again and pluged and unpluged the far right stick randomly. Aaaand it worked!
See, I got a pretty crappy tower: it's really narrow and the slots for RAM are cramped near the shell for storage devices. I tried to move my SSD a little bit lower and apparently pulled out that far right stick. Geez.

Sooo, the moral of the story is: doublecheck EVERY single thing related to the problem, especially if you have such an old and cheap hardware like mine. Better spend couple of minutes checking simple things than to waste the whole day testing it for no reason.

Solved.

sergii

Prominent
Oct 22, 2017
2
0
520
I was pretty sure that my RAM cards sit in place tight and didn't even make any attempt to check. But now I decided to dig into the case again and pluged and unpluged the far right stick randomly. Aaaand it worked!
See, I got a pretty crappy tower: it's really narrow and the slots for RAM are cramped near the shell for storage devices. I tried to move my SSD a little bit lower and apparently pulled out that far right stick. Geez.

Sooo, the moral of the story is: doublecheck EVERY single thing related to the problem, especially if you have such an old and cheap hardware like mine. Better spend couple of minutes checking simple things than to waste the whole day testing it for no reason.

Solved.
 
Solution