Luckymet

Dear reader,

A few weeks ago I received a message from an ex-colleague with the question if I could revise her computer: a very old computer from the year 2006 (a Medion (German), MSI MS-7091 mobo, 2x 512 MB DDR SDRAM, 1024 MB nVidia, BIOS-version G) running Windows XP, setup as an all multimedia computer with TV-tuner, multichannel sound and everything. Quite a thing for that time...

I told her I would look into it and see what I can do for her and after running the Windows 7 upgrade validation it showed that it probably only needed some extra RAM and I would not be able to find a driver for the USB cardreader.

All said and done, I went and checked for information about the mobo. Surprisingly, there's only one document available on the internet and I checked the specifications for the maximum allowed SDRAM on this mobo. Quote from a small manual about the MS-7091: 'The mainboard provides 4 slots for 184-pin DDR SDRAM DIMM (Double In-Line Memory Module) modules and supports the memory size up to 4GB. ... Each DIMM slot supports up to a maximum size of 1GB.'

So, after finding this information I went on a search of how much Windows 7 32-bit Home Premium would support and I found on several websites that it should support a physical amount of 4GB. Although warned in advance that I might not be able to address all that space as a user because of hardware taking up some space in there, I went along and bought four 1GB DDR1 400 MHz SDRAM DIMM modules (400 MHz is the maximum according to the same manual).

However, and here comes the trick: after installing the 4GB RAM in its original state (WinXP) it showed only 2GB of memory installed in system properties and through the taskmanager. At first I thought it was a problem with WinXP, but after upgrading to Win7 it didn't improve much... A very old program called AIDA32 and a much newer one, Piriform's Speccy, both tell me that all four DIMM slots are occupied with 1GB of SDRAM, but Windows doesn't show this in any way. I tried swapping around the SDRAM modules several times and in different order to see if there's anything wrong, but Win7 still came up with exactly no more than 2GB and AIDA32 and Speccy showing a total of 4GB.

My cousin tipped me into upgrading BIOS, because it's probably old. After looking for a flash upgrade I found that the new version (M) wouldn't be much younger and might not give any improvement. I went ahead and flashed the BIOS anyway; if I wouldn't I would've never known, but the result was: no setting available for this, so no improvement. After this I also checked the mobo for present jumpers; there were none.

So, long story and big but short question... Where do I lose these 2GB? Because the hardware says they are present and Windows doesn't recognize them at all. I've already thought about how much the hardware part would take up from this 4GB as 'shared RAM', but this could never land exactly on 2GB and even though, it should still say in the system properties that 4GB is installed... At least, that's how it works on my Acer Desktop computer from 2010 (it has 6GB physically installed on Win7 x64 of which 1GB is shared to VRAM and it still says in system properties that 6GB is installed).

Ms 7091 Ver 2 Manual Free

Any good help would be appreciated, thanks in advance! If there are any question or if further information is needed, please let me know.