Jim H. wrote:
> Thanks for responding Paul. Answers to your questions:
>
> The BIOS says 1G, not 2.
>
> I did not touch the internal machine at all except to unplug my old HDD and
> plug in my new SATA HDD (which formatted and loaded XP with no problems.).
>
> However, because of your question, I turned the PC off, inspected the memory
> sticks in their slots, loosened the keepers to pop the sticks part way out of
> the slot and then reseated them in their slots.
>
> I've got no reason to suspect any hardware failure since there has been no
> trauma to the machine; the only thing that changed was to do a pristine load
> of a new copy of XP (SP2c) onto a new HDD.
>
If the BIOS says 1GB, then the problem is hardware.
To test, try this:
Insert the sticks, one at a time. When you insert one of the sticks by
itself, it is going to report 1GB. When you insert the other stick by itself,
the computer is going to refuse to POST, and the beep pattern will be
"RAM failure".
I think you have a bad stick of RAM.
There is no point in me recommending memtest86+ or a run with Prime95
inside Windows, until the hardware test results look more encouraging.
If the BIOS refuses to report 2GB, then you already know you have a
problem. You cannot test, what the BIOS will not accept.
Paul