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I am the go to IT guy in the office, and a user was reporting that her computer was running slowly. After trying the obvious things, I decided to increase the RAM. She had 4GB installed; the RAM chip is labelled "4GB 2Rx8 PC£-12800U-11-11-B1". I bought an 8GB chip (labelled "8GBB 2Rx4 PC3-12800R-11-11-E2")

However, the BIOS lists there are only being one chip, the old one, and Windows only lists there as being 4GB RAM.

However! Speccy lists there are being 1 RAM stick installed, which is 8192 MBytes in size. However, it also lists there as being 3.82GB of physical memory installed. Speccy also says my PC has 4 RAM slots, but I can only see two, so I don't know whether I trust it.

I also checked that the memory is not limited in MSCONFIG.

Oh, and also when the 8GB stick is installed alone, the computer won't start and beeps angrily, so I assume it can't use it to boot up with?

Does this mean I've got a dodgy RAM stick? Or is there some compatibility issue that I wasn't aware of? I thought that as long as they were both DDR3 they should work?

Sorry for the long post, I am trying to get all the information across, but I'm sure there is stuff I'd forgotten!

edit: she is running 64-bit Windows 10 professional, so I don't think she's hitting the RAM limit of the OS.

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    What motherboard? What processor? What operating system? Is it definitely a 64-bit operating system? Some very old computers cannot handle more than 4GB and some systems have limits on the size of a memory stick in that the maximum per slot is 4GB.
    – Mokubai ♦
    Jul 19, 2017 at 14:11
  • Basically it sounds like she has 32bit windows instead of 64bit. This limits her to 3.8Gb of usable ram. Speccy is listing what the hardware reports, but just because it says there's 4 slots, there may only actually be 2 physical slots.
    – djsmiley2kStaysInside
    Jul 19, 2017 at 14:13
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    I don't think the OS is the root cause since the computer refuses to POST with the 8GB stick only. Sounds more like a motherboard-RAM compatibility problem first and foremost. Have you tried installing the RAM into another computer to verify that it is not dodgy? Also, the beep code for the motherboard can give you a hint as to whether it's a compatibility thing or something else.
    – lungj
    Jul 19, 2017 at 15:11
  • That's a good point!, I've added the OS to the question. How would I find the motherboard type, would I have to open the computer again? I think I will order a 4GB stick of RAM, they're not expensive and it might be the quickest way.
    – Ben Walker
    Jul 20, 2017 at 8:04
  • CPU-z might be able to show you the motherboard model.
    – Mokubai ♦
    Jul 20, 2017 at 10:09

1 Answer 1

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There's a good chance your motherboard can't read 8GB RAM chips. That would suggest it handles a maximum memory of 16GB (2x8GB). Likely not so. It probably handles a maximum of 8GB (2x4GB). It's also not good to unbalance the memory, you won't get maximum performance that way.

You need to add an identical 4GB chip.

As suggested in the previous comments, if your operating system is 32-bit it can't read more than the 4GB anyways. Not to mention that also hurts your performance.

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