hey all. I’ve tried different ram, a different windows version, I’ve messed around in bios and updated it as well. How can i get my pc to register the rest of my ram??

-cross posting-

  •  Vestria   ( @Vestria@beehaw.org ) 
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    121 year ago

    Since what everyone else has suggested hasn’t worked, there’s 3 more things to test:

    1. Update your BIOS. Depending on the age difference between your CPU and your MOBO, the BIOS might not be configured correctly for your CPU and thus half your RAM is unable to be addressed.

    2. Test your RAM sticks and memory slots individually. Put your sticks in the primary channel (per your MOBO specs) one at a time and reboot to see if they’re actually working. Then try moving them around to see if the issue is a bad slot, rather than a bad stick.

    3. Are you sure you’re not running a 32-bit OS? You’d be capped at 4GB system memory on 32-bit Windows, for example, no matter how much physical RAM you have.

      • Sort of, it depends on implementation. There are some techniques (which I don’t really know) that will allow a 32 bit OS to address more than 4GB, but natively it can’t for the same reason that the process will still be limited to 4GB.

        Perhaps you already know this but: 32 bits can only represent 2^32 numbers (4.294.967.296), which is how many bytes 4GB is equivalent to, and so anything after that cannot be reached. This also means 64 bits can address up to something like 17 billion GB, or about 16 EB.

      • Do you mean you’re getting an error message saying the “selected file is not a proper BIOS file”?

        Or are you getting a different error? If it’s the above, you’ll need to remove and redownload the updated BIOS, as it was corrupted during download, and you’ll need to make sure you have a stable connection while downloading to avoid it happening again.

        If you’re getting a different error I’d need to know the exact wording to help any further.