Just Installed New Ram - Start Up Issues

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stmik

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Hey Everyone,

Back in 2005 or 2006 I purchased a Dell XPS 710 completely stock from DELL and I have been quite pleased with it. After browsing online for a bit I decided to go ahead and upgrade my existing 2GB of RAM to 4GB. I went to Crucial's website and used their tool to automatically detect my RAM specs and bought one of their recommendations.

"2-1GB 240-PIN DIMM 128Mx64 DDR2 PC2-5300 UNBUFFERED"

Anyways, I received it and popped it inside and voila - all worked fine. Upon start up the computer recognized the memory change and proceeded to boot up. Now the issue came, it takes a relatively long time for Windows to load up.

It will remain at the "Windows is Starting up" blue screen for a good three minutes, whereas before I upgraded the RAM it only took a few seconds.

Now - from this I can assume that when I upgraded my RAM from 2GB to 4GB, I either screwed something up or my hardware just doesn't like 4GB of RAM.

This really isn't a gigantic problem because my computer's performance is fine, it's just a pesky problem to see the computer you spent so much money on take ages to turn on when the hardware isn't considered outdated.

So my question is, do you guys have any suggestions to what may have caused this? Should I try to remove a stick of RAM and see try booting up with only 3GB, because currently only 3GB is recognized in Windows XP (Current OS) - I read briefly online about the other 1GB being utilized for something else :confused:

Regards
 
the fact that only 3 is seen is because you're running 32bit windows. It has to do with ram addressing, and can be fixed by upgrading to 64bit windows. Also taking a very long time to boot into windows could be a sign of instability in the ram. i would run memtest86+ for like 2 passes or two hours and see if any errors pop up. I don't have the .iso link on hand, but if you do a quick search for memtest86 .iso it will pop up in thousands of threads.
 
the fact that only 3 is seen is because you're running 32bit windows. It has to do with ram addressing, and can be fixed by upgrading to 64bit windows. Also taking a very long time to boot into windows could be a sign of instability in the ram. i would run memtest86+ for like 2 passes or two hours and see if any errors pop up. I don't have the .iso link on hand, but if you do a quick search for memtest86 .iso it will pop up in thousands of threads.

Yea I have Ubuntu on a disc somewhere around here which has the memtest86 on it as well, I will run that tomorrow when I have more time

I also tried Vista to double check and Vista has the same issue except a lot worst. 25% of the time the desktop won't appear on start up.

If it does end up being memory instability, what are some actions I will most likely end up taking?
 
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