I recently installed 4 gig or ram into my 32bit vista box. I realize that I wont be able to use the entire 4 gig until I go to 64bit vista, but 2 gig wasn't enough and I figured I could use as much of the 4 gig as vista will allow until I upgrade to 64 bit.
When I installed the 4 gig of ram, all of my PCI cards, A second graphics card, a second NIC, and a firewire card, stop working. Looking in device manager, the error was "This device cannot find enough free resources that it can use".
I read that PCI cards need some of the addressable memory space to use for memory mapping? Is the problem I use it all up with my ram? If so, Can I reserve some memory for these devices?
My computer is a Dell Precision 390. It has the Intel 975X Express chipset and an Intel Core 2 6600 @2.40 GHz processor.
Update: Removing my second video card allowed the other two PCI cards to start working. I'm not sure why.
Best Answer
It could be that your computer is set to prioritize RAM over allocation for the cards. I would go to the BIOS and change the setting of
PNP OS Installed(it'll be different for every BIOS but the idea is that the OS can change the settings of your PCI cards). If it's set to disabled or off, enable it. This will let Windows change the settings of your cards and could allow them to work. If it is already enabled go ahead and disable it since it could be Windows that is reallocating things in the first place.Neither change will harm your computer and can easily be set back.