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4 GB ram = zippy vista / 8 GB ram = slow as F...
SuprGamerX
Member Posts: 531
Hi , the other day I decided to buy some Kingston KVR 800MHZ DDR2 4GB kit X 2 for a total of 8 GB.
I have windows 64 bit with all the latest updates.
Then decided to add the 2nd 4 GB kit of ram into my pc , and to my surprise the computer became SUPER SLOW , instead of taking seconds to boot it took MINUTES !!!
I tried swapping both kits but at only 4 GB at a time and they work perfectly , the minute I add another 4 GB , Vista becomes super slow.
I read that Vista Ultimate 64 bit can hold up to 128 GB , my motherboard can hold up to 8 GB of DDR2 800 mhz , I know it isn't a BIOS issue and I'm pretty sure it's a windows vista feature turned off/on (99% of all the stupid problems are related to a lame feature of windows turned on or off , the problem and joy (sarcasm) is finding that damn feature !) Microsoft has been pretty crappy with their support.
So i'm hoping you guys and girls have any insight on my little problem.
Thanks in advance !
Comments
I forgot to mention something important , when I put 4 GB of ram the CPU loads at like not even 10% , but when I add another 4 GB the CPU usage sky rockets to a 100% , which makes my windows very slow. The main question is why the hell does my CPU sky rockets to a 100% usage with 8 GB of ram but barely uses no CPU when I got 4 GB ram in?
You said you have win vista 64 with all the updates....do you mean windows updates only? If your board supports 8gb, you may have to update your BIOS if you havnt in a while. Also, some boards dont play nice with all RAM slots filled automatically....sometimes you need to adjust voltages, CAS settings and such because your memory controller is now being stressed much more by occupying all the slots. Other than that...you shouldnt be having much of a problem....
You may want to contact your mobo maker or read on the forums for that brand.
Your problem could be a number of things...most likely one of the two I mentioned above. I never liked filling all my memory slots....I always hear of a lot more people running into problems when they do, and if you dont know what to look for and how to adjust settings correctly, you could be out of luck.
Do read the forums for your Motherboard, I'm sure there will be other posts about similar problems and solutions....if that doesnt help, contact the manufacturer....if there is a solution you cant find on your own, they will be able to walk you through all of the more complex settings.
PS - return the RAM and put it towards something better, like a new CPU or GPU, your not going to see real world differences in games anyway with 8gbs
hmm, the memory has to match or the computer will run it at the slowest timing.
if your cpu is running at 100% you might have some faulty memory.
try running a memtest.
Drop the next-gen marketing and people will argue if the game itself has merit.
Are slow boot times the only problem? Or if you sit there after booting the computer for 15 minutes and let Windows do whatever it wants, does it still stay slow after that?
Adding more memory can cause slower booting in Vista because of prefetching. The underlying problem is that hard drives are an intrinsically slow technology. If a computer isn't ready for it when you want to load a program, then it has to load the program off of the hard drive, which takes a while.
Vista tries to get around this by guessing which programs you'll load ahead of time (based on which programs you've tended to load in the past), and loading them into system memory when it boots. If it guesses right, then when you go to actually load a program, it's already in memory, and loads quickly. If Vista guesses wrong, then when you go to load a program that it wasn't expecting, it drops other stuff out of memory to make room, and then loads your program as normal off of the hard drive.
The problem with how Vista handles prefetching is that it is way too aggressive about it. If you boot the computer and want to load a program quickly, Vista will have the hard drive already largely in use from preteching other programs, which means that the program you want takes a long time, because it has to wait while the hard drive does other things.
This is one of the big improvements in Windows 7. It will go ahead and guess what programs you want to run and load them in the background while the computer is idle. If you actually do anything, Windows 7 will completely stop loading other things for prefetching purposes, in order to immediately load what you tell it to. Vista wasn't smart enough to figure out that what you tell the computer to run is a better indicator of which programs you want run right then than what you've tended to run in the past. Windows 7 is smart enough to figure that out. And then if the computer is idle again later, Windows 7 will resume prefetching.
Both Windows 7 and Vista have to load the operating system, so booting still takes a while. It just takes a lot less time without prefetching. The trade-off is that loading programs later takes longer without prefetching. The reason that adding more memory can make prefetching take a lot longer is that if you have a lot more system memory available, then Vista can load a lot more programs into system memory. That makes it take a lot longer to finish prefetching.
If the computer remains slow indefinitely, and not just at boot, then this isn't the problem.
Having four memory modules means a lot more stress on your memory controller than if you only had two modules. That could be causing some sort of problem. This is why it is far preferable to have two 4 GB modules rather than four 2 GB modules, for example. Of course, as you already had two 2 GB modules, it was much cheaper to buy two more 2 GB modules rather than to toss what you had and buy two 4 GB modules. I'm not sure if your motherboard would support 4 GB modules anyway. It might not, if it has four memory slots and only supports 8 GB total.
Download and run CPU-Z from CPUID and make sure that your ram is all still running at 800mhz...
Probably has a bad chip and your CPU is working at 100% because the programs trying to load into that memory space are freaking out and eating up all your CPU cycles.
If it runs good, then you have either settings issues or maybe a bad memory slot on your motherboard.
Chances are, the memory is bad. Bad memory can cause bizarre problems. And once you get this diagnosed I expect you're going to end up with some bad OS system files causing issues.....because the bad memory caused corruption.
So......diagnose the memory issue, then expect to have to fix your OS install due to minor corruption causing problems overtime or major corruption causing immediate issues.
Only a few causes I can think of:
1) You're not running Win Vista 64 bit... which would limit you to 4 Gb usable.
2) Your motherboard/bios is limting you. Either could impact you and slow down your experience. I seem to remember back in the day some computer motherboards actually came with slots for different speeds of memory. Mind you this was a bit ago for me but I remember that I couldn't slot both and I HAD to slot the memory in a particular order (high to low I believe).
3) You've got a slow piece of RAM that isn't running the proper speed thus slowing ALL of your RAM down.
4) You've got something in the background that for WHATEVER reason has a memory leak. I seriously doubt this as I believe you'd recognize that issue.
Might be your processor. Most processors now have integrated memory controllers. It might not be able to handle the load. However, the prefetch in Vista is the most likely culprit.
Newer processors take DDR3 memory, too. If it's an Intel processor with DDR2, then the memory controller is probably in the chipset, which is part of the motherboard. An AMD processor with DDR2 memory probably has an integrated memory controller.
You should update the motherboard bios to the latest version.
You should also check if the ram is fault or not by running Memtest86+ for a few hours.
Just switch to Windows 7 Ultimate 64 Bit and you'll be set. I run 8gb with no issues at all.
Vista is nororious for poorly managing your systems resources, I can't believe anyone still uses it when there is a far superior alternative available with 7.
Why Windows 7 Ultimate? Even if you did want to upgrade to Windows 7, Ultimate isn't going to manage 8 GB of memory any differently from Home Premium.