I recently bought a kit machine with an Intel Duo CPU (64 bit) and an MSI P965 Neo-F motherboard. I’d put it together with the intention of using it for Photoshop stuff and for running labs in VMware. I stocked it with 4GB RAM (the motherboard limit) and installed Windows XP x64 Professional. I went 64bit to limit memory problems and also so I could run 64 bit VM’s for Exchange 2007.
I’d installed the OS, patched it up and then checked it over. Winver told me I only had 3.2GB of RAM. Funny, because BIOS told me I had a working 4GB. I went googling for ages but couldn’t find the correct answer. It was clear though, that lots of people were having this problem. Some stuff I found:
- Add /PAE to the boot.ini string. No joy there, and I didn’t think there would be on x64.
- Enable or disable in BIOS – Advanced Chipset the Memory Hole function. No one was clear on whether it should be enabled or disabled.
- Configure in BIOS – Advanced Chipset a function called Memory Mapping. I didn’t have that setting.
I was beginning to lose hope and starting to believe that 3/4 of GB of RAM was wasted. I then found some forum posts sayiong that the motherboard was dedicating memory to PCI devices. What! I knew graphics cards with no native RAM might do this but I’d bought a good card with native RAM. The articles claimed other devices could take 3/4 of GB of RAM and nothing could be done about it.
I then went to the source, MSI. I tried to search their support forum but their search engine is useless. I tried searching for "MSI P965 x64 RAM 4GB" but was told that was too generic a search. Rubbish! I had to manually browse through their forums and eventually found what I wanted. Someone had raised the same issue I had. Eventually someone had told them to installed v1.5 of the BIOS update (fairly new). It’s readme said it "resolved memory issues" but didn’t go into any detail. But the person posted back saying the problem was resolved by the update. Excellent.
I downloaded the update. Now MSI were sending me back to the stoneage. The installer was a DOS program and required a floppy drive and DOS diskettes. Luckily, I’d bought a floppy drive (I thought I’d need it for SATA drivers – which I didn’t in the end) but I had no diskettes. A trip to PC World and luckily the had about 5 boxes tucked away in a dusty, dark corner. MSI might want to consider an online updater like the one HP use. Most PC’s don’t come with floppy drive anymore and Microsoft is moving away from DOS towards WinPE.
The instructions were very unclear but I had to copy two files (an exe and a flash image) to one diskette and make a system drive with another. I booted into DOS amd seitched diskettes. I ran the exe. It then asked me in garbled non-English to type in the name of the image file. It took me 30 seconds to grasp what it was trying to ask me … some English lessons for the programmers please!
One flash update and a reboot later and I was sorted. Windows reported 4GB RAM was available. A by result was that the Realtek audio drivers needed to be reloaded.
Now I’ve got a powerful PC ready to run lots of VM’s!