So, I got up on one fine Saturday and decided to stack my PC with 4 Gigs of DDR2 RAM. I checked the prices for RAM at lamington road, and to my surprise, the price for the 1GB stick was around 1300 bucks! Of course, that was after a little bargain and deciding to take 2 sticks of 1 GB each... So here I was, heading back home, with 2 Gigs of DDR2 RAM, all sticks operating at a voltage of 1.8V+ and FSB of 800Mhz. I was just so happy of getting them! I was going to have a real fast PC (This was in addition to the already installed 2 Gigs of RAM)!
So I installed the sticks with an anticipation of a rocking speed to my PC and great boot times. All that was turned into a nightmare, when I noticed that my Windows Vista Ultimate is taking over a minute and a half to boot my installation! My earlier RAM, standing @ 2 GB was booting it much much faster! I tried frantically to do somethings to get the boot time up. The first thing that did strike me is my previous experience of Windows OS installations. Add a new hardware, and Windows sometimes tumbles down! That was my first guess. So my troubleshooting started with re-installing my OS. Interestingly, the installation too, was taking ages! I had to abort installation and install just 2 Gigs of RAM to get my new installation up and running... What do I do now? :-)
Well, this is how I troubleshooted... And am sure, this is something that will work for all those out there who own an Intel DG965RY OR (DG965XX series). My motherboard was at 1687 BIOS version. The following technet forum helped me solve my problem. I upgraded my BIOS to 1698, the release note clearly specifies that the fix in this release is to handle the slow boot issue when 4 Gigs of RAM is installed. Also, I installed one KB fix. Installing just the KB fix did not help me. Only after upgrading my BIOS to 1698 did the RAM's work for me :-)
The Technet Forum I am referring to:
http://forums.microsoft.com/technet/showpost.aspx?postid=1292561&siteid=17&sb=0&d=1&at=7&ft=11&tf=0&pageid=0
The Microsoft KB I am referring to: (KB929777)
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/929777
In case you face such similar problems, feel free to drop in a line to me :-). I'll be more than glad to help you!!
