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I currently have 2 gigs of DDR2 6400 800mhz ram installed in my MSI K9N Diamond MB that supports up to 8gigs of ram.

www.msicomputer.com/pr...d&class=mb

I was thinking of max'n out to 8 gigs but reading down the page it said XP would only recognize 4 gigs. Is this true and would I be wast'n money on 8? 4 would double what I have and would be no complaints but......MORE POWER arrrrrh arrrh aarrrhhh as the tool man would say .

RAM:

www.tigerdirect.com/ap...CatId=3412

Yep, that's true Homey...

You might want to start thinking about that new 'SUPER' 'puter soon..

Won't even recognise that Homey.
XP (32-bit) is limited to about 3.25Gb

You want to be thinking in terms of a 64-bit behemoth if you wanna use up all them cheap Korean chips.

Thnx!

Next question then....I have an AMD Athlon 64 x2 5000+ processor on this mobo and if I upgraded to XP 64 Pro then would it all be worth it? I have heard in the past that there are a few things that don't work well in the 64 XP. Is this still true? If so please list some of the limitations of 64 Xp Pro. I mostly use this machine for gaming and working in MS office for my business. All help is greatly appreciated!!

Well, at this point in time, I think running a max of 3gig ram on the setup you have should do. I haven't heard that many good things when mixing 64 bit with older games.

Of course, you can also dual boot...

Yeah ditto whut Bushy said.
You'd have to be running a helluva game to warrant the extra.
If you're sticking with Windows, version 7 (Vista 2) is expected out late part of next year.
I would suggest hanging on to see what the initial reports of that are.
If it supports the software and hardware you want, and no-one's reporting the same kind of suckage that I'm having with version 1, it might be worth looking into the 64bit version then.
I would suggest that hardware components will be stupid cheap by then as well, especially anything from Korea (if it isn't bankrupt by then).

Thnx !!! 3 gigs it is then .

Ok next 2 questions now that last one is solved . I have 2 250 gig sata hard drives in this machine and XP only sees one of them...why?

I did not set up any raid that I'm aware of I just let XP do it's thing when I first did this build almost 2 years ago. I may be wrong but I thought at the time as now that it would set up a raid 0 if I didn't do anything or tell it to set up anything different at the beginning.

I would like to take advantage of the 2nd HD as a backup drive or just more storage. I feel like a complete reformat is com'n soon as every now and then I'm gett'n error messages when I reboot such as the driver for the sound card didn't load right or the AVG tray didn't load right so I have to reboot again and that usually fixes that. Maybe I need to set a raid 1 or something when I do reformat or is there a way to use the 2nd HD without reformat'n?

1) Make sure it's installed correctly in the machine, (power cable, SATA cable,) then...

2) Make sure it's recognized in the BIOS setup.

All hardware has to be recognized at the BIOS level prior to 'handing it off' to the Operating System (OS).

To reformat the 2nd drive once it's 'seen' in XP, open "My Computer", right click the drives icon and choose format.

Thnx.... I'll look at it and let ya'll know if it gets seen.

Ok looked in BIOS and it did not see the second HD and figured some was unplugged. I decided to do my bi monthly cleaning while inside and found that the sata cable going to the 2nd hd was broken on the end and was not connected. I replaced the cable and rebooted and the BIOS did see the second hd. I did not mess with anything in the BIOS at this time and let the machine boot up. I went to MY Comp and XP still did not see the second hd. I rebooted back into BIOS and found that the sata raid setting was set to disable. Not really knowing what to do I enabled this and the puter would not boot. I had to pull the cmos battery to reset( didn't see the reset button at that time...lol) and went back in BIOS and figured out when I enable this option,6 the BIOS loses the hard drives? Neither one of the hds were found in the boot sequence. Had to reset the cmos again. OK I'm in need of some school'n on the BIOS...lol. That has to be the problem right?

Go back into BIOS and find out why the Drives aren't being seen such SATA isn't enabled by default or "AUTO" isn't set to detect HD's. Leave RAID alone, then...

Check the boot sequence and make sure the HD your have your OS on it the primary boot HD. It could be once the BIOS 'seen' the second drive, it put it as primary boot and there's no Boot Record on that drive.

- Shadow_Homfixr

I have 2 250 gig sata hard drives in this machine and XP only sees one of them...why?

First, make sure you have disabled Raid in the bios, you don't need it unless your running a raid system and you will only see one drive,

With raid off and the drive identified in the bios, boot into windows, if you can't see the second drive, I would suspect it's either not formatted or has a corrupt mbr.

It's unusual to have an unformatted hard drive these days unless you do it yourself by deleting the partition table, normally this occurs when your installing windows.

Anyhoo, go to admin tools, select computer management, in the left window at the bottom select disk management and you should be able to see your second drive listed, with unallocated space.

Click the drive and format it, then it should show in windows as normal.

Word of caution Murp...err, Homey, format the correct drive, not your C: drive (Listed as Sata 0) IIRC.

Thnx Kit and all I now see and can use my 2nd hd !

More space to store more stuff...lol Glad you got it working!!