Some sort of Bottleneck?

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Praey

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Hi all,

My laptop is an Alienware Area 51-m, warranty expired, and they didn't know what to do anyway. The problem is that I have been getting errors, bluescreens and lag with both of my 512MB sticks of RAM installed. But, when I remove one stick everything runs smoothly, it makes no sense to me at all. I have been using the Battlefield 1942 demo as a testing program since the differences are more noticable while running that game and any ill-effects seem to show up quickly. All my drivers are up to date and I just flashed my BIOS to a newer version, which didn't do much.

Here is what I found from my tests:

- Both RAM sticks, used seperately, have no problems and work fine.
- Both motherboard slots function correctly (I only have two).
- No errors, lag or bluescreens when using one stick of RAM, except for the normal lag.
- When using two sticks at once there is a problem with errors in games such as World of Warcraft and very choppy lag in the Battlefield 1942 demo, though the lag shows up gradually and get bad fast. The lag goes away for the most part if I turn off the sound, but after awhile it has a possibility of bluescreening me. Bluescreens are the last thing to happen with 1GB of RAM installed.

I don't know what else to do to narrow this down and I don't know where to go from here to fix this. What needs tweaking, what might need drivers or firmware upgrades, etc.

Please post any ideas you may have.

Thanks

Related Specs:
Alienware Area-51m Laptop
ATI Radeon Mobility 9600
1GB PC-2700 RAM
Intel Pentium 4, 2.8 GHz
Hitachi 7200RPM 60GB HDD (30GB Free)
 
Yes I have, 3 times total. I virus scan, defrag and have a firewall running so these arent problems caused by anything related to them and the problem comes back the same every time.
 
Alright. I'll post my findings a.s.a.p.

Edit - This will take some time, I don't see an option in BIOS.
 
Im not able to disable dual channel as far as I know, there isn't any option for it and I can't find a workaround.

However, I did just run an extensive test with Windows memory diagnostics tool and no errors were found.
 
Do you know the timings on the memory?

If so post them, and also anything else you can find in the option, IE anything along the lines of 1T, 2T.....
 
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