Nothing to do with 3G whatsoever!

[3g-g]

Righty,

I'm not a computer building genious, however I have managed to knock a few together in the past, cheapo ones for family and stuff which have just seemed to work on power on! But my own is giving me some grief and I'm hoping one of you cool guys might have the answer, or just confirm what i think is the issue!

My home PC, getting on 3 years old now has needed a bit more RAM (from it's current 512, shameful I know) for a wee while now, it's a got a good few programs on it, and I don't like how everyone elses PCs and MACs seem to run so much quicker!

On the motherboard are 4 DIMM slots for RAM, currently with a 256 in slot 1 and a 256 in slot 3, for some sort of extra speediness or best use of the RAM installed I'm lead to believe, so I bought myself a 1gb RAM module, the correct kind, PC3200 400MHZ DDR SDRAM, the same type as currently installed as 256s. Now, my PC isn't seeing the installed RAM, is this because I need to have RAM spread evenly over my 4 DIMM slots? Does anyone know? Am I going to have to buy another gig so it's all even? I thought it might be a BIOS setting I was missing, however I can't see anything in there for altering memory. If I only install the gig RAM, with none of the 256s the PC doesn't boot...

Answers on a postacard to me, G, at Talk3G towers.