Sound Card/Ram Upgrade Problem

Ok, so here's the deal. About a month back I got a 1 gb stick of ram for my old Dell Dimension 8300. It had 2 128mb sticks and 2 256mb sticks. Needless to say I needed an upgrade pretty badly. Now the D8300 has dual slots so the sticks of ram are supposed to be matching but researching the matter before hand I found that it would work with not matching sticks just not as well as it should.

I got the ram installed it, everything worked fine. Then the computer would occasionaly randomly restart or go to the blue screen of death. At first this wasn't a big deal (as my computer loaded much faster with the new ram ) I noticed that the computer seemed to have the most trouble when I was playing a game with a lot of sound or listening to music. But then the restarts became more frequent. So i decided to open up my computer and have a look.

I noticed that the ram was in the incorrect spots. I had the 2 256 sticks in slots 1 and 2 with the 1g in slot 3 and the 128 in slot 4. I moved it so that the 1g was in slot 1 and the 128mb in slot 2 with the 256's in slots 3 and 4. I booted up my computer and everything seemed fine.

I then went to play some music and just got error codes. I looked up the error codes and it says that there is no sound card installed or it is not installed properly. So I uninstalled the drivers and then reinstalled them, same problem. It's a Sound Blaster Live (wdm) sound card. I know it's old and I probably need a new one but I don't want to invest in a new sound card if that's not the problem.

Here is my system info:
Intel Pentium 4 2.8Ghz processor
1.62 gb of ram (total)
Nvida GeForce 6200 video card
Sound Blaster Live (wdm) sound card
Windows XP pro with SP 3
250 watt PSU (sounds kinda low)

I'm not sure if i'm overclocking my system or what, was hoping someone out there had a suggestion or a deffinate answer for me. Any responses would be greatly appreciated. And if you can help me fix it I would deffinately love you long time. :-D

 

Try using only the 1 Gig stick and see how you go. If it runs OK after testing like playing a game or using music add the others 1 at a time and repeat the same tests.

 

Use the Crucial Memory Advisor Tool: http://www.crucial.com/

Read the Manufacturer's Specifications' Questions and Answers. In Dell machines, RAM has to be installed in matching pairs.

32bit will recognize only between 3.0 and 3.5 GB of Memory.

Personally, I had 2x256 MB RAM initially and added 2x1GB RAM. It works great.