hi,
i wonder if you can help me.
i just bought a new stick of ram 1 gig,the pc reports ram size as 480 mb but the bank is 1gb,i checked it was sitting good
in the slot,i also changed slot and it was still reporting as 480 mb.
I reinstalled windows and the motherboard drivers
on a freshly formated drive.
Using on board video was no problem
but when i inserted an agp video card the pc refuses to boot.
I have looked in the bios and tried various settings
to overcome this problem such as apperture size,
telling bios to use agp in place of pci,using the option for
optimal settings.
i have 3 differant agp cards and am sure all 3 are good
as i have tested them in another pc.
I tried all 3 cards in this board with no success,as far i i can see
the cards should be compatible with this system
(i have 2x ati 9200 and 1x nvidia fx 5700 video cards)
I have set the hard drive and dvd drive on there own ide,
therefor the ide slots are not shared.
i get a blue screen error which says no page fault error and IRQ not equal or less,most of the time halfway through the windows set up.
hope all this makes sence.
thank you very much for taking the time to read this.

Some information would be useful, such as motherboard make and model.

I would start with a CMOS/BIOS reset - either by following the instructions in your motherboard owner's manual, or powering down the computer AND UNPLUGGING the cord from the wall, then pull the motherboard battery for a minute or so - observing necessary ESD precautions.

Then I would check your motherboard manual again to see how to disable on-board graphics (if it is not automatic), and how and what type additional RAM should and can be added.

You can test your RAM using one of the following programs. Both require you to create and boot to a bootable floppy disk or CD to run the diagnostics. Using the floppy method is generally easier and yet another reason I still include floppy drives in all my new PC builds. However, the CD method is just as effective at detecting RAM problems. Allow the diagnostics to run for several passes or even overnight. You should have no reported errors.

Windows Memory Diagnostic - see the easy to follow instructions under Quick Start Information.
or
MemTest86+ (for more advanced users) - an excellent how-to guide is available here.