Whats up with windows and ram?

[elpresidente2075]

So installed WinXP Pro on my 3 month old HP pavillion pc and I am having an issue with the ram - Apparently windows is only recognising half of it.

Here are some of the most pertinient details

AMD Turion64 ML-34 (single core)
Radeon Xpress 200m w/128 MB on the video card
There are 512 MB installed DDR, Dual Channel

The bios is recognizing all 512 of the ram, but windows properties only shows 256.

dxdiag also shows 256, but CPU-Z shows all 512!

Does anyone have any idea whats going on? Has anyone actually experienced this phenomenon? I don't know if this is just a reading error, causing no performance difference, but I think I can feel the difference, but since its pretty new and the os has only been installed for about 2 weeks, I haven't gotten to get a good feel of what its supposed to be. I have also noticed in the past couple days that it takes a very long time to boot.

Anybody have any ideas?

 

[bacis]

hi.
for windows xp to get a long time to start up is normaly.
my system is needs about 5minto sart all files an start up folder.
as for the ram i have experiencet it once but the problem was solved but itsself,on the next day(not next reboot)
you say that
There are 512 MB installed DDR, Dual Channel
is this in one slot?
or there are 2 slots with 256 mb each?
http://www.tiler.com/freemeter/
use that tool and the memory reportet there?

 

[elpresidente2075]

Yeah, forgot to mention that... 2x256 is the setup, in Dual Channel mode.

oh... Dual Channel implies two sticks, sorry...

 

[fattony]

is your video card onboard / built-in?
is the 128mb for it shared with your current amount of RAM or dedicated to its own seperate 128mb from your 512mb?

go to start > run > msinfo32 and see on the summary how much ram it shows (total physical memory)
go to start > run > winver and see how much it goes

also copy and paste the contents of your boot.ini here, i'll check for any weird switches in there, the file is hidden and located on your C drive, don't mess with it, just copy and paste th conents

 

[elpresidente2075]

It is its own seperate memory for the video card.

Msinfo32 states 512MB, with 28 free (I don't have enough progs running to use almost 500MB at idle)
Winver states: 261,680KB


Boot.ini:
[boot loader]
timeout=1
default=multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(3)\WINDOWS
[operating systems]
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(3)\WINDOWS="Microsoft Windows XP Professional" /noexecute=optin /fastdetect

This was not in the root of my C: drive... It was in the recovery partition that came with the computer. As its still under warranty, I wanted to retain the partition just in case I needed warranty service on it, even though I fully formatted (not quick) the main partition and installed a fresh copy of Pro where Home used to be. I'm really being perplexed by this situation.

A meg is 1024 KB, right? If that's so, then the two answers from msinfo32 and winver are directly conflicting... I don't get it. Like I said in my first post, mentioned the cpuz reading of 512 and the dxdiag of 256... What's with all the readings all over the place?

 

[fattony]

damn...that's messed up, your boot.ini options are defaults so they're ok
are you all up to date with HP's stuff? check your model # and make sure all the components are the newest ones available...

also 28mb free of physical memory is not good man, it'll do a lot of paging and slow you down, hope you got a big pagefile

 

[elpresidente2075]

Yeah, I think windows is totally not reading it right.

This is what the physical memory section of the TaskManager is saying:
Total: 261,680
Available: between 7,000 and 12,000 (I'm transferring some large files over my network
System Cache: between 150,000 and 170,000


As soon as I installed XP Pro, I downloaded every driver from their website. I even tried to call them and ask about what may be wrong, but all they said is, "Hey, you installed the non-standard OS, you gotta find your own support." That's paraphrased of course. But still, I can't figure out whats going on with this system. I updated the bios at the same time that I did the OS, so it should be up to date. I really don't know what the problem is.

 

[elpresidente2075]

Alrighty, so I've done some checking, and I ran memtest. The result of memtest showed that all of the memory was good, but that just over half of it is reserved for some reason. It shows 510 MB cached and 258 MB reserved, just for reference. To compare this to some known-good results, I did the same test on my desktop and it showed 1023 MB cached and 356 KB reserved.

Now, the onboard video memory is disabled as there is 128MB built into the graphics subsystem. Just to make sure this wasn't the problem, I turned it on and ran memtest and it showed 490 MB cached and 258 MB reserved, clearly showing a difference in regularly available ram and that of the "reserved" section. Anyone have any ideas?