Memory Issues; Causing Crashing

Hello everyone. I've read through several forums before I found this one, and I've searched through several posts on here but no one seems to have had the same issues I'm having following a recent memory upgrade. Let me explain-

I decided to upgrade the RAM in my computer, a Dell Dimension E-521, from the stock 512mb to at least 1gig. I bought a gig stick, popped it in there, and started having problems. After consulting the manual, I learned that I'm supposed to used matched sets of RAM, so I went and bought another 1gig stick to match. Installed that, same issues. After more perusal of the internetz and calling a few people, a guy told me to try one stick and then the other to determine if I had a faulty stick. So I tried the 2nd one by itself, and it worked fine, so I figured the first stick was bad. Took it back, got a new one and popped it in there. Same issues!!

Now, heres a few things that seem abnormal. First, in the BIOS, on the memory tab, it shows the slots for the memory, the size of each, and the "rank" of them. Now, when I had the original(512) stick in there with the 1gig, they were ranked "1" and "2", respectively. Now, just the one stick by itself (in the first DIMM slot) is ranked "2". If I install the 2nd one, it too is ranked as "2". So I'm thinking that the CPU (or whatever, I'm not uber-technical here, this is my first time upgrading) is giving 2nd priority to both sticks of ram, and its causing it to freak out. Another wierd/interesting thing is that when I have the one stick by itself, I get the "System Memory has Changed" screen right before the OS loads. But if I put the other one in, that screen won't come up, even though the BIOS says its there and the System Info in Windows says its reading 1.9gigs of RAM (the missing memory is for the on-board video card). Has anyone seen this issue before? Any ideas on how to fix it?

System Information
AMD Athelon 64 processor
1gig of DDR2 SDRAM Pc-5300
Nvidia GeForce 6150LE video card
Windows XP Home SP2 (32 bit, I think)

Any other information you need, let me know. Thanks in advance for any and all help!!


Forum ate my post, I had more detail in here but I can't remember it all now.