computer tech question
 

My friend has a power spec computer had 768 mb of ram. She wanted to boost it up , I got her two gig of ram installed it . It started up fine showed the 2 gig and then down loaded win xp updates for the computer. Reboot, it sticks so I power restart now it only show 512 of ram. Any ideas?

can the bios handle 2 gb?

Are they paired sticks, and in correct slots?

may need to flash bios with newest

- bios cant handle
- motherboards cant handle 2 different ones
- wrong slot or inserted wrong

id check that first

take out the old, try again with only the new blocks

if not then try only with 1024

if it's one block you just wasted a few $$$

something that i thought had nothing to do with the ram....i had also installed a firewire card at the same time. i have removed the firewire card now and it seems to work fine. could it be that it needs a bigger power supply?
thank you so much for all your replies. :)

IF that's the case, could just be some shared IRQ problems or something similar.

Try switching around which pci slot the firewire card is plugged into, not a psu problem when ram won't show up (ram takes so little power that it really couldn't be that). Has to be a sharing violation of resources like munki suggested.