Terrible performance after upgrading V1S to 4gb ram!

I just installed a matched pair of 2Gb Geil PC2-5300 sticks of ram and the performance is awful. Way worse then the 2gb that came with the unit and bordering on unusable, especially the video performance. I notice it most when scrolling up and down a page with the mouse wheel. I can see it struggling to redraw the page as it slowly redraws it line by line.

Im running XP SP2 on a V1S-B1. Xp only recognized 3gb of ram and i think it is using the /PAE switch although i never changed anything. Basically just removed the original ram and stuck in the new ram and rebooted.

Anyone have any ideas? Im not really sure how to troubleshoot this.

 

Have you running something like memtest86 to test the ram? I was thinking about upgrading to 4 gigs soon...

 

Been shipping the v1s with 4gb for a while. no issues with vista or xp however the driver installation in xp is very troublesome. Do you have any process running with a trailing "*32" after it?

 

I second memtest, although if the memory is bad it would probably bluescreen instead of working poorly.

I suspect BIOS and/or mainboard incompatibilities... here's what I suggest.

1. Remove one 2GB stick, replace with a 1GB stick. Check if performance improves. If it does, then switch the 2GB sticks (out with the first one, in with the second). If performance stays good, it's clearly an incompatibility issue.

2. Update BIOS if it's not already the latest version.

3. Try another operating system (e.g., Live Linux) to eliminate OS issues.

Post back with what you find out.

 

Hi, just an update. I removed one of the 2gb sticks and everything went back to normal. I swapped the sticks out and no problems. I then tried keeping a 2gb stick in and adding one of the original 1gb sticks giving me a total of 3gb and ran into the same problems. It seems that anything over 2gb gives me issues.

@E.B.E. How do i go about updating my bios on XP. I currenlty am running 208. The flash update i found on the asus website is listed as vista only. Is it safe to use this on XP?

@Geared2play.com: No 32 programs running. Could you tell me which brand exactly you have had success with for 4gb ram on XP?

thx again

 

Check my BIOS guide (se my signature) for 2 ways in which you can update the BIOS without using Windows at all (which is not recommended anyway).

I would next try to eliminate OS incompatibilities.
I know for instance that there are some hotfixes that fix issues regarding large RAM sizes in WinXP... maybe also in Vista?

You can try booting a Linux Live CD (knopper.org or slax.org) and seeing if the computer is sluggish with 4 GB of RAM... but you need to factor out the delay produced by the need to read everything from the CD and that's not easy.

You can also do a fresh Win install with 3 or 4 GB installed, and see if that fixes the issue. Maybe something is badly coded and some registry setting / windows component "remembers" the 2GB and is not working properly with more than that.

 

I seem to recall something about 32bit XP only being able, by default, to use 2GB. Are you using a frig to get the extra 2GB?

 

32 bit is only able to address 3.5GB out of which around .5 of the address space will be allocated to IO devices, so you're left with 3GB of effective space, yes.

But this shouldn't affect the performance of the computer.

There is the so-called PAE bit (I think that's the correct acronym) that might be present on the motherboard which is able to split the > 3.5GB memory into "pages" that can be switched by the OS.

 

when 3gb or 4gb is present are there any devices in device manager which have code 10 or any other error or exclamation points besides the itm module?

 

@Geared2Play: I put the 4gb back in and noticed that there werent any code 10's in the device manager but there was this which i havent seen before:

Mobile Intel(R) PM965/GM965/GL960 Express PCI
Express Root Port - 2A01

This device cannot find enough free resources that it can use. (Code 12)

If you want to use this device, you will need to disable one of the other devices on this system.

PCI bus 0, device 1, function 0

Device Instance Id
PCI\VEN_8086&DEV_2A01&SUBSYS_00000000&REV_03\3&11583659&0&08


Hardware Ids
PCI\VEN_8086&DEV_2A01&SUBSYS_00000000&REV_03
PCI\VEN_8086&DEV_2A01&SUBSYS_00000000
PCI\VEN_8086&DEV_2A01&REV_03
PCI\VEN_8086&DEV_2A01
PCI\VEN_8086&DEV_2A01&CC_060400
PCI\VEN_8086&DEV_2A01&CC_0604

Not sure if this is causing the poor performance but it definitely seems like it could be the problem. Any ideas on how to fix this?

thx

 

oppp!!! wrong area, very sorry !!!

 

So far as far as i know we are the only onces who can mount win xp on asus notebooks which have more then 2gb of ram. If you have an asus or many other brands with xp and more then 2gb it will not work right. if you paid your vendor for xp you should request a refund as they will not be able to get dev man to recognize all devices. such errors will come up. Not all notebooks are affected by this but i believe v1s is! so far i know g1s, g2s and a few more will not work right with xp and more then 2gb of ram unless we sold them. other vendors who offer customization on them may not even be aware of the issues. Good luck