Vista x64 Ultimate and Over 4gbs of Ram

  • Thread starter Thread starter deviantdreamer
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deviantdreamer

This is a problem that's been plaguing me for the last few days. I recently
upgraded to 8gb of ram. After a long process of elimination, I have found
out my system works beautifully with 4gb. Anything above that, when vista is
loading and the green bar is going across the screen, it hangs for at least 5
minutes.

Now, I have tried a series of things:

-Installing KB929777
-Reinstalling Vista with only 2gb of ram, installing KB929777, then adding
in remaining ram
-Running memtest to check all sticks (all sticks passed)
-Chkdsk (no problems found.)

So I know it's the ram, and I know it's when I go over 4gb that I have
problems. On a fresh install, boot time with 4gb or less is seriously under
15 seconds. With over 4gb, I am looking at least 5 minutes.

Any suggestions? I am going crazy.
 
You can try going into the bios and set some lower memory timings. I have 8
GB of DDR2-800 ram, which sometimes failed to post from a cold boot while
running at its default speeds. I set it to run at 667MHz instead of 800, and
it's been 100% stable. I didn't have to make any other changes, but
depending on what your ram supports, you could also try raising the memory
voltage from it's default level. I ran benchmarks at both speeds and
decreasing the frequency had minimal impact on performance. In my case the
cpu has a 1333 MHz frontside bus, which makes it synchronous with 667MHz
ram. Apparently many motherboards have trouble running some ram at default
speeds when all 4 memory slots are filled. So basically you're using
"over-clocking" techniques at standard speed.
 
My ram is max speed of DDR2-667, which the bios sees it as. I'll have to
check out the voltages, and look at all of that. I'll let you know what I
find. Thanks!!
 
The issue probably is not the amount of ram but the number of dimm slots
filled. I know that is the problem with some mobos using nVidia chipsets
and pc6400 sticks when you try to use the fourth dimm (whether you are using
1GB dimms or 2GB dimms doesn't matter). I had to drop back to pc5300 sticks
in one machine to get around it. There is something about memory
controllers that do 32-bit DMA under a 64-bit OS that is involved.
 
deviantdreamer said:
This is a problem that's been plaguing me for the last few days. I
recently
upgraded to 8gb of ram. After a long process of elimination, I have found
out my system works beautifully with 4gb. Anything above that, when vista
is
loading and the green bar is going across the screen, it hangs for at
least 5
minutes.
Click to expand...

I get around it by running VistaBootPro and protecting 256MB RAM from
use by Vista. Now instead of 60+ passes, the green bar makes only 5.

Tom Lake

www.vistabootpro.org
 
Ended up being a bad bios update from Intel. I had to roll back to a much
previous bios (1669). Apparently every bios update after that one has
problems with memory being over 4gb. Something with the memory manager.

Rolled back the bios, everything is 100% again :D
 
deviantdreamer said:
Ended up being a bad bios update from Intel. I had to roll back to a much
previous bios (1669). Apparently every bios update after that one has
problems with memory being over 4gb. Something with the memory manager.

Rolled back the bios, everything is 100% again :D
Click to expand...

Which motherboard do you have? I have an Intel DG965WH and it has problems
with more than 4GB and a 64-bit OS. I have BIOS 1719 installed.

Tom Lake
 
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