Memory row numbers

Dooom

just noticed this now, i had rebooted the comp and on a page of some name, in dos, it said DDR DIMMS in rows 0 4 5. however - the first stick (256mb) is in slot 1 (row 0 1), nothing in slot 2 (row 2 3) and the second stick (512mb) is in slot 3 (row 4 5).
should it not have said DDR DIMMS in rows 0 1 4 5? or is it because its half the size of the other? i have been having some problems with the comp recently since i put in the second stick of ram...could it be down to this?

sam

nah, your 256meg chip is probably all on one bank, "dimm" just means dual in-line memory MODULE, it doesnt mean there have to be chips in both banks in the module..

the problems are most likely being caused by differing cas/etc latencies between the 2 ram chips, try swapping them around to see if the motherboard will default to the slower ram chips speeds or something..

Dooom

ok ive fiddled about a bit and ive come across the pagefile. now normally it should be 1.5 times the amount of the ram you have, but mine's only set at 384mb. now thats grand if i only had 256mb ram, but it wont go up with the extra 512 stick i put in. when i try to set it up to 1150 (recommended size), during the blue screen and the memory dump thing, the computer just reboots and just goes back to the 384. is there some option i have to override first?

sam

ok ive fiddled about a bit and ive come across the pagefile. now normally it should be 1.5 times the amount of the ram you have

actually theres no reason for this.. you shouldnt even need to have a pagefile, if you have enough ram for whatever you run on the pc.. (which im guessing you do, unless youre running a server of some sort)

the probable reason youve been told to have a pagefile 1.5 times your ram is, if winnt starts to crash, but doesnt crash completely, i think it dumps (or used to) the entire contents of the ram into the pagefile, which you could dissect at the next boot to possibly retrieve data, but in practice its pretty much never used as generally if windows is only "beginning to crash" like that you can still close your programs and save to hard disk before it completely crashes - its a bit similar to linux core files after a system crash, its only good if youre a developer type and trying to figure out why your system is crashing, rarely of any use to end users

Balfa

Perhaps you don't have enough disk space for such a big page file? Even if you have a bit more than that, it still may be a problem. I have feck-all space on C: so i asked XP to use my partition for storing the pagefile. it's all good, now.

Anyway, as sam says, it's probably a moot point. With the amount of RAM you now have, there's really very little reason you'd need a pagefile bigger than 384MB. Sure, I only have 256MB and it barely pages at all. certainly not noticeably so.

About the problems you've been having... I think it's general practice to put the biggest DIMM in the socket 0, and the next in socket 1 and so on. Maybe this is just flashbacks from my days of playing with SIMMs, but it can't hurt to try

Failing that, you could always try the 512 alone, and leave the 256 out. I honestly don't think the extra 256 would give any perceptible increase in performance, but I'm sure there are those who'd disagree with me on this.

Anyway, if you explain the nature of the problems you've been having, i'm sure will have a better chance of helping you out with them

astrofool

Just click the option to let windows auto manage it.

What operating system ?

and the Dimm row numbers are often a bit odd, but can be ignored largely