I recently bought a new computer. The board is a Gigabyte that runs the new KT400 chipset. It has an athlon XP 2200 Thouroughbred processor. At first, I was running this board with my old PC 2100 Samsung ram (512MB), with a soundblaster audigy and a GF4 Ti4200 graphics card. Everything was running perfectly. (By the way, the motherboard has three ram slots, I was only using two with the PC2100). SO, I recently upgraded to three PC3200 (256 MB) Samsung modules. I thought it would just be a matter of taking out the old, and putting in the new. However, after installing the new ram, my display was messed up bad. It went down to 16 colors, with limited resolution, etc. (also, a message would appear saying I didn't have enough memory to perform any operations) SO, I restarted the computer, went to the bios and made sure it was set to recognize the correct ram, I tried reinstalling the display driver, etc. Nada... So, I went for the big haul and decided to just reformat and reinstall windows. Now the computer recognizes the ram and the display is fine. However, when installing the driver for my audigy soundblaster card, the same thing as before happend, and my resolution went down (though this time at least I still had access to my memory). Also, a message would appear saying I should go to Microsoft website to update display driver???? What??? When I remove the audigy from my system, the display went back to normal. I just want to know what is up? WHy did everything work fine with 2 PC 2100 modules, but crash with the PC 3200? And, yes, my motherboard supports it. I look forward to any and all help you guys can give?
What OS are you running? If it's Windows 98, it will only support up to 512MB of RAM. Reduce the system to 512MB of RAM and try again.
Most likely like BigB said it's due to too much ram, either that or your having problems with the 3200 ram in your KT400. Try taking out a stick and see if that helps, if so it'll be a too much ram problem. If your still having errors I'd guess it's the KT400 doesn't like the ram. If it's a case of too much ram you'll have to make due with 512 megs or upgrade to 2K/XP.
In addition to the OS choice, the KT400 boards seem to be having trouble running PC3200 @ 400MHz in more than one slot. Like mentioned earlier, a Win9x OS isn't designed to work with anything above 512, and really it's not that great above 256 megs. I'd strongly advise going to another OS. ME is really one of the crappiest products I've ever used, and the reason I switched to running Win2k, although I run XP currently. With the Audigy, Creative has some driver updates you might wanna snag. Do know that you'll still have to install the drivers that come with the card first before updating (which I think is really stupid).
Thanks for all of your suggestions. I heard from someone else that you might be able to change the setting in the system.ini file so that Win ME supports more than 512 MB? Do any of you know anything about that or how to do it? Also, I like playing games on my computer, so I wanted your opinion on WIN XP. Is it gamer friendly? SHould I get an update or the full version? Will I totally have to reinstall all of my software and download compatible drivers for Win XP? Thanks again.
I think it depends on the age of the games your playing, a few older titles and DOS based titles don't work but the majority work fine. Check out NT Compatible and you should be able to see if you can move to XP without any major headaches. Since you already have Win ME I'd just get an upgrade edition and save yourself a few $'s. You can use the upgrade cd for a clean install if you want it will just ask you for your ME cd to verify you are actually entitled to use the upgrade cd. For drivers you'd have to switch to NT based drivers, although some of the ME drivers may work fine without causing any major problems. It's a bit of a pain removing all your ME drivers and installing their XP equivilents but the increased stability, reliabilty and features are well worth it.
If you go over to Win XP, please, DO A CLEAN INSTALL! Neglecting to do so will give you more trouble than what you currently have. I know as I upgraded Win2k over ME once---and that didn't do me any good. A clean install was great, however. Since XP is basically Win2k with a prettier GUI, the principles are the same. And, yes, if you do a clean install (it's in your best interests to do so) you'll have to get different drivers. Doing an upgrade might alleviate some of this, but who knows what other problems you might encounter. NTCompatible is an excellent place to start, and if you're further stuck, the forums are great as well.
