Yes, it makes terrible 'the world is ending' beeps when I boot with only the 1 gig sticks in. If I put them in with the original ram too, I just get silence. Checking my PM...

Yeah, return the PNY memory. Kingston or Corsair should work without a problem. If the MB is beeping with only the PNY me in, no diagnostic sw will help.

Dave

Have you tried pulling the 512's & just running the 1gbs?

Yeah, when I pull the 512s is when the hell beeps occur. :D

Dave- thanks for the PM- I am D/Ling it so if I need it I have it, but yeah, it probably can't help me.

On a side note- it definitely can't help me until I figure out why after I installed my video card that my CD boot device is no loner found... strange (especially because it works, so its not like I knocked a wore or something).

Thanks all for the help- looks like I will try going to the store tomorrow and exchanging for something else.

It's not just for memory. ;) It's bootable and you can also run it under Windows.

Eureka!
 

Thank you all for the help.

So here's the deal- my motherboard said it could support PC2-3200 and PC2-4200. The RAM I bought was PC-5300, but it claimed to be backwards compatible. Either it wasn't, or it was just bad ram (hard to believe BOTH sticks were bad though).

The solution was to exchange for two 1-gig sticks of PC2-4200 (this time brand is Corsair). Snapped them in, booted, and perfect.

The downside is that the 2 512 sticks are PC2-3200, which means they all run that way (I lose out on some speed). How much better would it be to upgrade the old ones too?

Anyhow, the difference is quite pronounced while gaming. The combination of a real video card and 2 more gigs of ram really pulled things together nicely.

As for the booting issue, for whatever reason the BIOS decided to start looking for a floppy drive on booting. I have never had a floppy drive. Anyhow, disabled that and for the moment it is smooth sailing.

You wrote"
Slot 'CHANNEL A DIMM 0' has 512 MB
Slot 'CHANNEL B DIMM 0' has 512 MB
Slot 'CHANNEL A DIMM 1' is Empty
Slot 'CHANNEL B DIMM 1' is Empty"

I am not sure that it matters anymore since the 4 sticks aren't matched. But it is best to keep the 512mb sticks in one channel and the 1Gb sticks in another channel.

It still matters supposedly- they are paired correctly (its even color-coded for guys like me). :D

I had a similar experience in the past. I bought memory that was a step faster than mine. Supposedly it was backwards compatible, but it didn't work in my comp. I got the slower memory and it worked fine.

I think it would be worth in to get two more of the same 1GB Corsair sticks!

Money well spent, IMO. Isn't that spec Corsair memory about $30 to $40 a stick?

Best,

Kurt

I got 2 gigs for $50 actually. So you think it would make a discernible difference?

I read that it would only be able to read another .5gig, because for some reason beyond my knowledge you have the have XP loaded in 64bit to read 4 gigs of ram.

That's beyond my knowledge too! I don't know how much RAM your current system can address. :(

Some one will chime in here to help, I bet.

Best,

Kurt

I'm glad you were able to get things working. It's not the the other RAM was bad (faulty), I have seen that happen too many times with some of the lower end memory companies. The RAM just sucks and causes many headaches.

According to Kingston:

Standard Memory: 256 MB (Removable) or
512 MB (Removable)

Maximum Memory: 4 GB

Expansion: 4 Sockets (2 Banks of 2)

CPU & ChipSet: Intel Pentium 4 Intel 915G

Bus Architecture: PCI Express; USB

Mfgr's System P/N's: N/A

Comments MODULES MUST BE ORDERED AND INSTALLED IN PAIRS for Dual Channel mode.

This system is configurable and may ship with either DDR2-400 (KTD-DM8400/xx) or DDR2-533 (KTD-DM8400A/xx). These are compatible and can be mixed, however when mixed they will default to DDR2-400.

If 4GB is installed, the recognized memory may be reduced to 3.5GB or less (depending on system configuration and memory allocation).

Maximum configurations require a 64-bit operating system.