Half my RAM is gone!

[Banfred]

I woke up this morning to find a message during start up that told me that there has been a change in memory and upon starting up Company of Heroes, it told me that I could not play due to not having enough physical memory. I then checked under System on the Control Panel and it said that I had less than 500 mb of RAM, when I know that I have a little less than 1 GB the night before when everything ran perfectly!

I know no one touched my computer during the night and I have no idea what could have happened.

[Maizel]

Try taking it in and out of the slot, try different slots if that doesn;t work.

[Leonidas The Lion]

clean the comp might be dust that is making the computer not recognise the RAM

[Simetrical]

Yeah, first try opening up the computer and reseating everything, cleaning out dust, that sort of thing. If that doesn't work, some of your RAM might be dead. RAM is really cheap, you should have more than a gig anyway.

[Maizel]

Yeah, first try opening up the computer and reseating everything, cleaning out dust, that sort of thing. If that doesn't work, some of your RAM might be dead. RAM is really cheap, you should have more than a gig anyway.

In my experience, it's more likely that the slot is broken, rather than the ram, if cleaning/reseating doesn't work.


I've had broken sticks of ram, loads of times, I got tons of BSODS, but never did it not detect them.

But even then, a new stick of ram is the first i'd try as well, since a new Mobo is a bit more expensive.

[Simetrical]

I'm pretty sure I've had RAM that wasn't picked up, but didn't cause other problems. You can figure out if it's the slot easily enough, just try putting them in different slots to eliminate possibilities.

[Banfred]

Thanks for your replies.

I woke up this morning and everything was back to normal. No cleaning required though.

Nevertheless, my computer could use some cleaning.

[Strelok]

Had this happen twice in my life.

One time one of the RAM sticks was slightly loose.

The second time my motherboard didn't like the timing settings I used and when I rebooted it kindly adjusted to the defaults for me to get things working.

If the problem happens again, try seeing if it's a specific RAM slot, or RAM stick, or if something is iffy in your BIOS settings (could try setting BIOS to defaults)

[M D]

How much are RAM sticks?

[Spiff]

Depends on the size, type, frequency and manufacturer. There's quite a range - surprisingly though older types might end up costing more since they aren't being made any more. In saying that you can always get decent ram fairly cheaply - say roughly 2gb for £35 or so? Something like that.