Hey, I have an older compaq sr1055cl, with an Asus A7V8X-LA motherboard with 512 megs of ram. I recently bought another gig stick to supplement it. However, my computer only shows 1 gig being used. The other 512 stick is still in there. I googled around and it said the maximum amount of ram that can be used can be decided by the manufacturer. And for my computer it said 1 gig. Is there any way around this? Or will my 512 stick just be useless sitting in there. thanks.

do you have the manual for the motherboard? Probably not if its a compaq eh?

It should support up to 2gb, but seeing it's a comp-crap, I wouldn't be surprised if they hard-wired it to hinder upgrades (they used to use super-glue to stop you from upgrading). You could always ring compaq tech support and ask them...

yes the product specification says 2GB of ram can be installed. Does the bigger of the 2 sticks have to be installed in the first slot?

definitely check the manual. IIRC some older motherboards required that all the RAM chips be exactly the same size. It's also possible that you bought RAM that's not compatible with the motherboard (i.e. it's the wrong speed or type).

Motherboards are really sensitive to RAM types. You can't just grab a RAM chip and expect it to work. You should always check the RAM vendor's page to get a listing of the RAM types that are compatible with a given motherboard. Corsair has a really dope finder where you enter your motherboard and it tells you all the chips that will be compatible.

-me

yes i did the research and found the correct ram to put in the slot. It shows that the first 512 stick is being used in full, and then only 512 megs of the 1 gig stick is being used. And further more the website disappeared to download drivers for this computer, so it is using the old ones.

It may be a dual channel system, where both banks need to be the same size, if populated.