ram problem.. memory leak?

[Eric H.]

I built PC for my boss a few months ago, and today he tells me that the system has been running a lot slower than it used to. He checked system properties, and it showed 128kb ram. not mb. there's 512MB installed. what the &$%^?

here are his specs:

Soyo K7VTA-Pro 266fsb
1.2 ghz thunderbird
512 crucial ram
40 gig IBM hard drive
300watt power

windows 2000 pro is installed. can anyone help?

[Paul Victorey]

Well, did it always show 128? I've had problems (mostly on early Athlon motherboards) with certain types of RAM showing lower values on certain motherboards.

Otherwise, if the machine has 2 128MB sticks, make sure both are seated properly, and functional.

[Eric H.]

The computer originally said 512, like it should.. theres 2 x 256mb RAM installed.

I'll check to see what the bios says on startup about memory count

[Paul Victorey]

Ouch, I just reread the first -- 128 KILOBYTES?

I'd say you probably have a defective piece of RAM there; I'd try swapping out both the DIMMs as a first step.

[Statica]

Turn on your memory count in BIOS. And see what is reported! That will allow you to check if it is a Windows issue or a RAM issue.
The other thing is to check the memory reported in the Task Manager.

And it doesnt sound like a hardware / RAM issue at all. Win2k will NOT boot with that amt of RAM.
Sounds like a registry issue
Also just so you are aware of it, any M$ OS will slow down with time. There are a variety of reasons for it, most of it has to do with the registry size and profile size getting bloated. There are a lot of steps you can take to keep your machine running smoothly. Make sure that there are no more services and programs running at any time than you really need. Check and try to reduce the # of cached items. Things like huge wallpapers (reduce to the max size of your resolution); lots of files on the desktop etc are things that are cached, keep your registry clean, clean out your IE cache regularly, keep your profile size manageable, keep your temp directory clean.

There are a lot of things that should be considered. Unfortunately this is true of EVERY M$ OS.