Scratched connector pin on ram

So I took out the memory sticks from my HP dv5t yesterday to check out the specs on them because I only have 3gb and I wanted to get a new stick to dual channel with. When I took it out, I noticed on my 2gb stick that one of the pins was severely scratched where more than 50% of the gold or whatever shiny metal they put on there was gone. That worried me, so when I put the sticks back in, I booted up my comp and checked dxdiag, and it was saying that I only had 3002mb of memory, haha. I'm pretty sure I should have 3072mb (3*1024).

So, can anyone tell me if these two things are related? I was only going to replace my 1gb stick but now should I replace both since the 2gb seems to be damaged?

 

What flavor Windows are you running, and is it 32 or 64-bit?

 

RAM memory, much like Hard Drive space does not read exactly as advertised. An 80GB hard drive is really what like 74Gigs? That's because the conversion from MB (in your case 3002) does not translate exactly to GB (you think you have 3gigs or 3x 1024). If the stick was damaged it wouldn't read at all.

You are fine. If anyone asks you have 3 gigs of ram.

P.S. if you have 32bit, that will also display less RAM. But again its likely a conversion thing, or at worst your system is using some of the ram so its not displaying all of it.

 

Not quite. RAM advertisements definitely line up with what is installed and the computer understands.

There are a few things that might be doing this. For one, you might be hitting the 4GB addressing barrier that all 32-bit OSes have...I know on my older desktop I had 3072MB of RAM until I installed another PCI card...then I had about 2990MB available. Just because of addressing limitations. You might have something similar going on. You might also have a video card that uses shared RAM, which depending on the card/BIOS/laptop may or may not affect how much RAM you see through DXDIAG. There might be a few other reasons as well, specific to your computer, that I am not aware of.

I wouldn't worry about it. For some reason 70MB of RAM is missing, and it isn't because the RAM chips are damaged.

 

Yes, as said its kind of an addressing limitation. All of the memory wont be accessible in the OS, since address space is allocated to other critical stuff such as the system BIOS and motherboard resources, etc.

If the memory module would have been physically damaged, the BIOS would have most likely halted your system from booting.

 

I have accidentally fried PC133 ECC memory from a Dell workstation in my Compaq Proliant. The cards literally sparked on boot.
After powering off I noticed that a few of the gold contacts completely fried off the circuit board leaving black traces.
I put the memory back in my Dell and it worked fine regardless of the problem

I can upload an image if necessary.
If the same applies your scratched memory pin shouldnt cause any problems

You can verify the memory is working fine with memtest, but thats up to you

K-TRON

 

Sorry, forgot to mention I am using vista x64. But all of those are definitely possible, thank you. One thing I somehow forgot to mention was that when I used the comp with only my 1gb stick (undamaged) it worked fine, but when I put the 2gb back in (damaged), windows couldn't boot. I restarted, it booted, and I went ahead and did a memory test anyway.

Either way, it functions normally, and I already went ahead and purchased a new pair of sticks anyway. Thank you all for the help!