Have I lost RAM?

[hudson]

Hello All,

Recently I got my PC back from the shop. A vicious virus attack locked everything down, even offline, and I discovered that all my programs were wiped out.

I have restored everything lost, and the machine seems to work OK. However, what I am discovering is that I seem to be short on RAM. For example, some programs I install tell me I have isufficient RAM (less that 64MB) to install properly. Relatively small files in Photoshop (5-30 MB) are running slow, and some functions tell me I have insufficient RAM to run them. This is new.

When I go into the control panel > system, I find the original specs: 63 MB. But I have 192 MB of RAM installed, plenty to do what I was doing before.

So my question is: Is it possible that the viral attack damaged some of my RAM modules, or is the computer not communicating with itself properly? What's going on??

I have Windows 98 2nd Ed., a year 2000 Toshiba PC with 500 MHertz processor and 6 Gigs of hard memory.

Thank you for your help.

[Killer_Typo]

open your machine up, ive hear of people sending their stuff to tech repair places and getting it back with less ram, Different CPU's, wrong parts and such. make sure you have the right ammount in your machine. or your memory could have gone bad, and now its not being read.

[Catweazle]

hudson, if you had 192 Mb of RAM in that system when it went to the repair shop, and 64Mb when it came back, then I'd suggest it's time to confront them about it.

It's quite possible that the RAM is still in there. The reported 63Mb is one short mate! That suggests to me that they've reset the CMOS settings, and perhaps a setting has ended up enabled which 'protects' 1Mb of RAM (in a specific location) from use. The setting is not needed, and may perhaps be preventing the rest of your RAM from being recognised.

If that's the case, no drama. It's simply a matter of going into BIOS setup, and disabling the setting.

But if that repair shop has actually piched some of your RAM, you should confront and perhaps charge them over it. (Or at least throw a brick through their window!)

[DMR]

Just another vote of agreement.

Even if the repair shop didn't purpously skneetch a stick of your RAM (and yes- that definitely does happen), they may have forgotten to reinstall it or they reinstalled it incorrectly. Open the case to physically verify what you've got in there.