I realize you probably hate a lot of the standard Windows Crap that is “part of the Windows experience!”… I do to. Point of this blog though is to help those who are NOT as advanced as you and I (or who don’t like to use third party file manager apps or who CAN’T because their business or company won’t allow them to use those apps) and to provide tips to them that they may find useful. That doesn’t mean I don’t use or own products that enhance Windows Vista or XP - esp. when it comes to system maintenance and security.

Anyway, thanks for the tip on Explorer² Lite. I’ll take a look at it and see if I like it.

Blackwolf

Give Explorer² Lite a try - maybe you’ll be like me a pay for the registered version, simply to thank the author for such a fine FREE product, which has no nasty nags of any kind.

Back to the point at hand…it has many advanced ways of filtering, and uses a 2 pane style, which somehow MS never got around to realizing was far superior and allows for much greater ease of use.

Same as the top toolbars; you have Desktop, Favorites, etc. Are they different toolbars or ?

Thanks,
Mario

The Apple machine is undoubtedly a good one, but no one really buys a laptop looking for the last bit of speed. If the person is really interested in speed, a desktop is purchased.

Sorry it took me so long to get back to you.

Here’s what I believe is happening:

Since you are trying to run 3 sticks of RAM, and 2 are from one manuf. and 1 from the other, you are running into a conflict because of different speeds and specifications of the chips.

If I remember correctly, most motherboards (I can’t be completely certain of your situation since you didn’t give me the exact model number and Gigabyte has something like 20 or 30 motherboards that have 8n in them), esp. high end boards, need the memory installed in pairs - that is, if you have 2 or more memory sticks that are the same, they need to be placed in the memory slots that are on the same channel, while any odd stick gets put into the slot that is on a separate channel.

With three sticks of RAM, what you need to do, is look at the slots that the memory sticks go in. Two of them should be the same color (usually blue). Those two slots should be where the new memory goes, since they are the same. The other slot (usually black), should be where your older memory goes. This ensures that the paired sticks that are the same, are on the same channel together, while the odd stick is on a separate channel.

Note: The two slots that are on the same channel may not be right next to each other - so, if you have your old chip in the first memory slot and it’s blue, and then you tried to put 1 of your new sticks in the slot next to it, because it’s a different channel, it’ll work.

The moment that you try to put the 2nd new stick in the third channel, assuming it too is blue, you are now putting unmatched pairs on the same channel, and your system won’t boot, because it can’t figure out what the correct memory timings are.

By moving the old chip to the middle channel and the new chip to the 1st and last channel (ASSUMING you have only three slots) you should be able to overcome the problem you’ve been having.

As for Windows XP, it is fully capable of running up to 4 Gigs of RAM, so that should not be the cause of the problem you are having.

Hope that helps!

BlackWolf

Sorry for the delay in response - but I live in S. Korea at the moment so I am between 13-18 hours ahead of you time wise.

Anyway: There are several things you can do to try to narrow this down.

It would help if I knew some things too - for example, I’m assuming that you are running Windows Vista on this machine since you didn’t specify otherwise - if not, then please let me know as the troubleshooting techniques are different for each OS. Also, what sort of machine is it? Laptop/Desktop? What hardware does it have? and so on.

Without this info, I can only say in general, the problems that you are experiencing are probably being caused by a network card, a sound/audio card, PCMCIA drivers, or your video card. It is possible that you are having problems due to something else, but it’s not possible to tell without more information - basically, nothing can be completely ruled out at this stage.

Also, have you checked to make sure you are installing the correct type of RAM for your system? IE: If you system uses DDR RAM, you are not trying to put DDR2 RAM in it. Are you mixing your RAM - that is, are you leaving in one chip and adding another chip that may have different specs? If so, try swapping the chips (if you can) to different slots/positions.

Since you say the RAM is good, I’m assuming that everything I just mentioned in the above paragraph has already been done, so on to the next step:

Can you boot into safe mode with the new RAM installed? If so, then you almost certainly have a driver problem or conflict of some sort.

While in safe mode, bring up the run dialog (Press and hold the windows key and the press the “R” key). Type in “msconfig” - no quotes. Once the System Configuration window opens up, click the “Boot” tab and enable and enable “OS boot information”.

When you reboot the next time, you will see a list of drivers being loaded. If at any point, the system hangs for more than a couple of minutes at this screen, then you can see what the last driver being loaded was. While this doesn’t mean 100% that this is the driver causing the problem, it does indicate at least where you should look to see where the problem might be hiding.
You should also enable “Boot Log” so that a log file will be generated during boot. If you can’t find a problem with the drivers as described above, go to the boot log and see what is failing to load properly.

Hope this helps!

BlackWolf