Advice on a replacement PC

Jao

Jao

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I am sure this is a regular question but computer tech is not my thing and I am sure there are folk here who are expert in this filed. My 2009 AMD Quad Core Phenom is seriously playing up and now only recognises 3.33 gig of the 8gig fitted. It probably is time to replace it and I am looking for a cost effective replacement. I use Lightroom 4 and am a film photographer shooting 35mm and 120. I have 2 scanners connected to the machine, a Plustek 7600i and an Epson V500. I only use the machine for image scanning, minor tweaking in LR4 and a bit of excel and word processing and a bit of surfing. I have my images stored on two external 2TB drives. I would be grateful for suggestions on a replacement, I plan on keeping my existing 22" monitor . I have about £500 ish to spend. advice and suggestions welcome.
 
Not a thought on a new machine, but is the operating system 32 bit? If so, then in total it cannot address more than 4 Gig of memory. The PC itself will use some and if your PC has a graphics card then the GC's memory will be included in that total. This could be the reason why only 3.33 Gig is recognised.

Dave
 
Tringa said:
Not a thought on a new machine, but is the operating system 32 bit? If so, then in total it cannot address more than 4 Gig of memory. The PC itself will use some and if your PC has a graphics card then the GC's memory will be included in that total. This could be the reason why only 3.33 Gig is recognised.

Dave
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Thanks Dave, It must have a 64bit OS because until recently the machine recognised all the RAM, clearly something is goo dg wrong as it now only sees the 3.3!

petersmart said:
Have you tried re-seating the memory, using only 1 module (if you have 2 fitted) or replacing a module in case it's just a memory fault?
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Hi Peter, yes I checked the seating of all four sticks and they all seem to be in fine. What I might do is start removing some to see if. I can through a process of I elimination see if some ae faulty?
 
Jao said:
Thanks Dave, It must have a 64bit OS because until recently the machine recognised all the RAM, clearly something is goo dg wrong as it now only sees the 3.3!



Hi Peter, yes I checked the seating of all four sticks and they all seem to be in fine. What I might do is start removing some to see if. I can through a process of I elimination see if some ae faulty?
Click to expand...

Well it is odd that 3.3 Gb is seen because that is what windows sees on a 32 bit machine.

Have you checked in System that you do still have a 64 bit OS? - Seems a daft question I know but still worth a check.

Also worth checking your BIOS to see if anything could have changed and if you have fast start enabled in the BIOS try altering it so that it does a complete check on all the memory.

And make sure that your PC will run with only one bank filled.
 
If your system is designed to use pairs of memory DIMM's, it could be that a single DIMM module has failed or needs reseating, not allowing the other member of the pair to work either, reducing the memory to 4Gb. Take into account a potential onboard graphics chip that could be using 512 > 750Mb of memory and there is your 3.3Gb answer.

Running a program called CPU-Z will tell you which DIMM's the computer can see, I would highly advise to do this and post the results, obviously we can all still recommend PC spec's as required, but it would be good from a resale perspective to get this resolved as well :)
 
Pete thanks for your thoughts, I will do some more experiments.

Neil I will try CPU Z and see what it reveals
 
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