Memory not allocating correctly -> Crashing on Win 7 64bit.

Hello guys!

I've found stuff on these forums to help me out via Google before so thanks for that! I can't really wrap my head around this one though...

I've had 4gigs of RAM installed for very long and I was able to work fine with my browser open + Photoshop and Blender in Win XP. I've quite recently upgraded from Win Xp 32bit to Win 7 64bit.

After installing Win 7 64bit I added 2x1GB sticks into my system to take advantage of memory I had available. These "new" sticks were of lower clocks than my 2x2GB I had installed so I tested clocking them higher. Well that wasn't really stable so I figured running them at lower clocks wouldn't hurt all that much.

So everything seemed to work fine, Memtest didn't whine about anything and everything seems to work well enough. Now however I can't have my browser + the other programs open at the same time but windows keeps whining about it running out of memory even though the taskbar memory amounts don't add up at all.

I have like 5Gigs used but adding everything doesn't even get up to 2Gigs. I know about windows keeping unused memory ready for use but it doesn't seem to be that or otherwise I don't know why my programs keep crashing all the time.

I have a load of tabs open in my browser but they don't take all that much memory. And I don't have any other programs open that would use that much for anything. This seems really odd to me.

Here's the resourcemonitor screenshot. Sorry it's in finnish but I guess it's clear enough anyway.



Another problem I forgot to add is that my display turns black sometimes and sometimes (not every time) after that I get the display driver error and that it's recovered. I've had this very seldomly before but now it seems quite common so I figured it might have something to do with that the display driver doesn't get enough memory to use either. Just a wild guess but textureloading in Blender doesn't work all the time etc. so it seems like a vRAM problem to me.

Hello BenLind and welcome to Seven Forums.

Try removing the 2 x 1GB sticks and go back to your original 4GB configuration. If you moved the 4GB sticks around make sure they're in their original slots. Test your computer and check Resource Monitor again. Right now, with the 2 X 1GB sticks installed your Available Memory is only 917MB and the Cached Memory is 242MB. That seems really, really low. You're also showing only 1MB Hardware Cached memory in the display. That usually runs from 10MB up to a few hundred MB depending on hardware installed.

Thanks for the welcome!

Ok so I tried it out. Still only 1MB for the hardware. The browser seems to take more memory than visible as well but still it only takes about 3gigs now. Odd.





Opening Photoshop in addition to that and trying to open a 4K texture now gave an out of RAM message.

Hi Ben

Just a quick thought,.... are you memory's installed in Dual channel mode... I mean ... most of the motherboard do have color coded memory slots .... so you would need to put the 2X2GB in the same colored slot or 2x1Gb in the remaining colored slots...

OldMX said:

dude, how many tabs are loaded on chrome??

Good question! Looks like a LOT.

BenLind - Please take some time to add some detailed specs of your PC in your profile, so we know what type of motherboard, CPU, etc that you have.

centaur78 said:

Hi Ben

Just a quick thought,.... are you memory's installed in Dual channel mode... I mean ... most of the motherboard do have color coded memory slots .... so you would need to put the 2X2GB in the same colored slot or 2x1Gb in the remaining colored slots...

Yeah they are 2x2GB both in the right slots aka same color.

OldMX said:

dude, how many tabs are loaded on chrome??

Quite a lot actually but that has never bothered me before even with a lot more tabs. I have a lot to read etc. so I like to have them open until I get them done. Slacking on the reading or whatever piles it up quickly.
They hardly consume a lot of memory anyway so that's not really an issue anyway.

TBoyd said:

OldMX said:

dude, how many tabs are loaded on chrome??

Good question! Looks like a LOT.

BenLind - Please take some time to add some detailed specs of your PC in your profile, so we know what type of motherboard, CPU, etc that you have.

I added the specs to my profile now. Thanks for the tip!

Could the Bios setting "Allow Memory Remapping" or something similar be a reason for this weird behaviour or am I just talking crap here?

You may have done this already, but check out section 2.4.2 "Memory Configurations" in the motherboard manual. If you don't have it, here's the link: http://dlcdnet.asus.com/pub/ASUS/mb/...8_commando.pdf
There seem to be a lot of stipulations concerning the memory configurations in that section.

Also, did you check to see if the new memory is included in the qualified vendor list for the mobo?

centaur78 said:

Hi Ben

Based on the image you posted last... I do see quite a number of hard faults from Chrome, Mspaint, Cmdagent (Comodo firewall/antivirus ??). Even though they are not high enough to warrant a serious problem now... it would be wise if you could sort the Resmon by hard faults and post it here

Which bring me to the second question... you do have a SSD... how is the paging set here ??

Do you have another HDD that you could use to move the paging file from the SSD. As you do run a lot of memory intensive programs all at the same time .... like blender, photoshop etc.... its wise to work on your project files from HDD rather than the SSD.

Also even though you have told be the memories at the right position.... could you also check the actual memory from the BIOS when you install all the RAMS... i mean does it show 5 GB in BIOS.

Here's the resmon again.




The SSD only has 1GB pagefile since it's so small and I need the space. I've read that you don't need a pagefile really if you don't have craploads of stuff open and you run out of RAM. Don't know if that's true though.

Yes I have a HDD where all my project files are so I work that way already. I have software installed on the SSD to run and open faster but the projects are on the HDD.


And yes I have confirmed earlier that Bios recognizes the 6GB so it shouldn't be a problem with that.

TBoyd said:

You may have done this already, but check out section 2.4.2 "Memory Configurations" in the motherboard manual. If you don't have it, here's the link: http://dlcdnet.asus.com/pub/ASUS/mb/...8_commando.pdf
There seem to be a lot of stipulations concerning the memory configurations in that section.

Also, did you check to see if the new memory is included in the qualified vendor list for the mobo?

Yes it seems to be ok but the 2x2GB set is not from the same manufacturer as the 2x1GB set. I have 2x2GB dual channel memory from OCZ but the other memory is Nvidia SLI ready memory and isn't actually new. It was my old memory which was 2x1GB but I had sold it to a friend when I bought the 2x2GB set instead. Now when upgrading to 64bit I could use more than 4GB and my friend didn't need my old memory anymore so he gave it back.
Hope that made sense.

So now I have 6GB that is detected and works alright I suppose but my actual problem is still that memory is "bound" by something that isn't visible.

Could it be some malicious software or something? I'd think it would be visible though and I can't really see any point with it either since it doesn't really seem to do anything other than use memory but I'm just throwing it out there.