Locking Problems

Recently, I upgraded my computer with an additonal 2 gb of ram from PQI. The additional 2, 1 gb sticks gave me a total of 3 gb of memory. However, I started to immediately to experience locking problems which would requie a soft boot to recover from. I returned the memory to PQI for replacement thinking the memory was bad. I received the replacement memory sticks yesterday and installed them. My computer ran fine for about 6 hours then locked up. I'd like to know if anyone knows a means by which this problem can be diagnosed? I don't think I got bad memory from PQI again, but I suppose itis possible. I'm thinking the thing to do is to start with a memory test to verify that the memor is good, but following that should the memory turn out to be good, what would be the next step? Could it be a bios problem? Anyway, I'm Running a 3.2 ghz AMD processor w/64 bit extensions with NVidia 3 chipset.
Thanks in advance for your help.

Best Regards,
Dan

 

You may have already thought of this ....
Are you sure that your particular mobo can take that much mem per slot?check your manual or website

 

You are using Windows XP, right?

If so, are you using XP 64 bit edition, or 32 bit?

XP 32-bit edition can only see a total of 4GB RAM. The memory sticks you are using consume 3GB of this limit alone. That leaves you with 1GB for your pagefile, (as windows sees this as 'virtual memory'), which I found after a couple fresh installs last night, is at approx 2GB when you first get into windows. Not good if this is the case, but repairable.

To change the size of your pagefile, do the following:

1. Right-click My Computer and select 'Properties'.
2. Select the 'Advanced' tab
3. Under 'Performance', press the 'Settings' button
4. Select the 'Advanced' tab
5. Under 'Virtual Memory', press the 'Change' button

Here, you can manually set the size of the page file, or remove it completely. To do so, select the radio button of your choice, enter limits if necessary (keeping in mind that we have only 1024MB AT MOST to work with.), and pressing the set button. Press ok to exit each dialog. Restart your machine.

Ignore this if you are using 64-bit edition, as the limit is higher!