Now I can see why they charge money to install memory....

[Fox5]

My computer specs are
1.4 gig athlon
256 MB DDR 133
128 MB DDR 133
Sound Blaster PCI 128(shows up as SB(WBM) with the latest drivers, though)
Radeon 9700 Pro
Maxtor 80 GB ATA 133 7200 RPM hard drive
Maxtor 20 GB ATA 100 5400 RPM hard drive
Windows 98 SE
330 Watt power supply
K7VTA3 motherboard(VIA chipset)

Anyhow, I tried to add another 512 MB DDR 133. While the 512 alone works, the 256 and 128 work together and alone, the 512 combined with anything else results in numerous errors. It took me a while to get sound working again with a configuration greater than 512, and video only works properly every 1 in 2 or 3 times. Virus scanners don't work at all, and I often have trouble running any kind of executable. If I'm lucky, I can run one program before I start getting errors. I get many out of memory errors, and errors telling me to enable virtual memory. Virtual memory is set to let windows handle it, though I did manually set it to 200 once, but that didn't seem to make a difference.(not sure if I rebooted or not after setting it to that) I tried installing xp when I had all the memory in(even though it was my dad's copy, and I wouldn't have been able to use it for more than 30 days anyhow, but I thought maybe windows 98 couldn't handle that much memory) but during that, it came up with an error, said all data may be lost, and then my main harddrive was toast. I figure it was the boot sector that got messed up. Anyhow, somehow we managed to restore it, bu I still have the problems with memory amounts greater than 512. My motherboard manual lists two different amounts of memory it supports, one listing says 1 GB per slot for a total of 3 GB, the other says 512 per slot, for a total of 1.5 GB. Either way, I don't have that much, and it does read all my memory on bootup.

 

[Tagrineth]

Well first off did you try messing with the memory settings in your BIOS?

If nothing works...

The mainboard's memory controller might be screwed. At least that's what it sounds like to me...

 

[Fox5]

The only memory related settings I can really change(besides speed) are the cycle length and bank interleave. Most of the stuff is autodetect, with no option to manually set it.

 

[Fox5]

It would stink if it was something wrong with the motherboard, especially since this one is less than 3 months old. A little while back, there was a power surge, which fried my previous motherboard and power supply. Well, if it is the motherboard, I was thinking about getting a new mobo+cpu anyhow, and putting the current one into a second computer, and then that wouldn't be a problem.

BTW, under the device manager, there was one device I could never get working, even after installing the via 4 in 1 drivers. It is listed under other devices as a pci serial controller. I don't know what driver it might require, and windows can't find one either. Under resources it says memory range- e6000000 - e600ffff.

 

[mat]

win9x has problems if you have >512MB ram (something with the caching i think), but there are some settings to limit the Cache to a smaller size that should help.

(or upgrade to the "real" Windows )

 

[McElvis]

Humm.. A friend of mine had a similar problem with a VIA motherboard. Had to settle for just 384MB (256+128) in the end.

How many chips does the 512MB module have? Some motherboards have problems with multiple modules if one of the modules has more than 16 chips on it.

Make sure that the new 512MB module is not registered. You should be able to tell from the markings on the DIMM. You cannot mix registered and non-registered memory. Well, on most motherboards anyway.

You could give the following a go -
Try installing a "real" windows o/s (2000/XP) with just your old memory, the 256 and 128. Once the o/s is installed, try putting the newer 512 in as well, and see what happens. Don't think that this will solve your problems though, if the WinXP setup fails with the memory.

 

[Fox5]

The 512 module has 16 chips, so does the 256. Also, the 128 has a big sticker on it that says registered, but from what I've found on the Internet, it is not registered. I couldn't match the part number of the 256, but similar part numbers were registered, however, the 256 does have a U on it, which I assume stands for unregistered/unbuffered. Finally, I couldn't find anything on the 512, but it also has a U on it.

BTW, with memory, does the order truly matter(like putting the largest one in the first slot), or not?

 

[Fox5]

BTW, mat, how do you change the cache size?

 

[Fox5]

Well, I installed xp, and it fixed the problem. The downside is that xp runs far slower(and I don't like a lot of the user friendly defaults in the way the its setup..such as the automatic combining of many explorer windows into one on the tool bar, covering up all the icons for programs in the bottom right, things like that), but I guess I have more of a reason for a new cpu now than just games.....oh and while 98 was disabling the virtual memory because it wasn't needed, apparently xp needs a lot more memory before it is satisfied. Currently, with very little open(well, that I opened, in total there are 31 running processes), I'm using 151 MB of my page file, and 2-18% of my cpu.

 

[BRiT]

You do know you can disable all those settings. After a bit of tweaking, you can get WinXP to look like Win2K. Also have a search around for TweakUI. It'll let you tweak settings beyond the default exposed by WinXP.

 

[McElvis]

Glad you got it working