Originally Posted by Digerati;187947Typically, I would disagree quite strongly with that advice but in this case, since this is a fresh install and it is not likely you will lose all your personal data, or set your security back months (or even years), it is good advice.

I think you should[INDENT

Power down and unplug
Discharge yourself and pull the battery
Insert all three sticks
Ensure cables are routed to minimize impacting desired front to back air flow through the case
Ensure all cable connections are tight
Insert the battery
Plug in and boot straight into the BIOS setup menu
Set date and time and verify RAM and drives are properly identified
"SAVE and Exit"
Cross fingers and see what happens[/INDENT]

I cant boot ANYTHING with 3 sticks(forget i ever said channel), or 2 sticks. When I was finishing my build , for the life of me I could not figure out how to get my vista dvd to boot. It kept saying 'nonsystem disk or disk error" or something like that. So I called EVGA tech support and one of the thing he told me to try was pulling out two of my 3 sticks, and It worked. He said vista cant install with more than 2gb of ram, but i dont know if thats really true. I asked him if after the installiation if i could reinstall my other 2 sticks and he said yes. So I did, only to discover the problem stated in my origional post.

Originally Posted by Digerati

If you want to change the context of your first post, you probably shouldn't as the thread may be hard to follow.

What did you want to change?

"Channel", in this case, means a path to the memory. Dual channels means the CPU can communicate with the RAM over two paths - triple obviously means 3 paths. Without this "architecture" designed into the motherboard, memory access will be done to all memory modules via a single channel.

Your owners manual will explain it.

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I thought 1 stick = single channel, 2 sticks = dual channel, 3 thru 6 sticks = triple channel. My motherboard has 6 memory slots, divided into 3 groups of 2 slots, with each pair having a green slot and a black slot. My motherboard manual is very clear in that the green slots must be occupied before the black. I ASSUMED that each black green pair was a channel. For the sake of my post tho, i had no need to mention channels and should just have said sticks. On my post what I meant was: single channel really ment 1 stick, dual channel really ment 2 sticks, and triple channel really ment 3 sticks. This mistake has proven confusing to a lot of people, and not just in this forum.

I am reading that installing Vista SP 1 fixes the problem with having more than 2 gb of ram [microsoft article]. If you have vista installed try installing SP 1 before putting in all of the ram. If you haven't I would install it with 2 gb of ram in your computer, installing SP 1, and then try and put in the other stick of ram.

He said vista cant install with more than 2gb of ram, but i dont know if thats really true.

Hmm, I have never heard of a problem with 2Gb - I suspect it was 3Gb and he was making a blanket statement as this only affects some boards - I think town's link might be on track.

The article also gives some hot fixes for those who don't want to install SP 1 but I recommend that you do.