RAM help pls

dillon · June 3, 2022 at 8:33 PM

I bought 8gb of used DDR3 PC3-12800 RAM and after installing it, 4.1gb of it is hardware reserved. I've tried taking out all other RAM sticks and just booting with this single stick (which only worked after moving it to a different RAM slot) and it will boot but again with the 4.1gb reserved.

I've tried msconfig advanced options to make sure all of it is utilized, but doing so doesn't make a difference. Windows memory diagnostic finds no issue either.

Some things to note:

this stick was actually exchanged for another I purchased and took back as it came up as all 8gb as being hardware reserved, shortly before dying completely
I have a further 2gb of RAM which I installed a while back which runs perfectly
My motherboard (https://support.hp.com/in-en/document/c03757575 , MSI MS-7778) supports the RAM and supports up to 32gb, I will adding this extra 8gb to have 14gb total
There are no BIOS settings relating to memory (very barebones) and I have even reset to default settings. Fast boot is also turned off.
AFAIK the BIOS is up to date, however i'm going to try and update it once this thread is posted.

If anyone has anything that I could try, pls let me know

dillon · June 3, 2022 at 8:39 PM

BIOS update did absolutely nothing

MiasmusAlt · June 8, 2022 at 6:05 PM

have you tried using something that isn't windows and seeing if something changes?

square · June 8, 2022 at 7:48 PM

if your APU/igpu is active it automatically uses a bit of ram as it's vram

if you do have an APU/igpu disable it in bios by enabling discrete graphics

dillon · June 8, 2022 at 10:12 PM

↩ @'Miasmus.' yeah that’s worth a try, I’ll give Linux a go

dillon · June 8, 2022 at 10:13 PM

↩ square I think the option is disabled but I’ll double check as I can’t remember if I redisabled when resetting my bios

aqua95 · June 10, 2022 at 4:11 PM

↩ @'dillon ' can you try seeing if there's an option in BIOS that lets you allocate memory to the iGPU? if yes, try reducing the memory allocated to your iGPU.
Otherwise, there's nothing you can do, rather than disabling the iGPU, although i dont know it will make a difference.

RAM help pls

wild1145 July 16, 2022 at 11:47 PM

wild1145 November 2, 2022 at 6:25 PM