My system is a Dell laptop inspiron 17R n7010. it is a great laptop and sports a first generation 64bit i5 intel processor with 4Gig of main memory.
i am multi-booting into Win7, Win8, and Mountain lion 10.8.2 all works fine. i saw that memory had gotten dirt cheap and figured that it was worth the investment. so i bought two 8g sticks to replace my two 2g sticks. popped the new memory in and the bios promptly recognized the 16g of new memory no problem. Switched over to my OSX boot and up she comes with 16g of main memory. Runs great!
Feeling good i go over to booting up Win7, loading bar completes, get the splash screen a pause and a soft reset to the system!
i switch over to the Win8 partition and same result.
i am of course using 64bit versions of both operating systems so it is clear that isn't the problem. so i pull out the install disk and boot off of them thinking maybe a driver or something. It does the same thing! thinking maybe a newer version might be more robust i download Windows Server 2012 and try that install disk. Indeed it is a different loader program because after the four sheets logo it gives a blue screen of death with an error before shutting off the machine.
Tried all of the combinations of memory sticks including singles and mixing with 2g stick, etc. no go.
Come to find out my A11 version of Dell Bios (their latest and i suspect last upgrade) will only support two 4g memory sticks, not even just one 8g. stick
Obviously the machine supports the 16g as i can boot linux disks all day long as well, it is Microsoft and Dell working together to make sure folks have to buy new machines. In talking to Crucial they claim and rightfully so that their memory is just fine, and that it is a windows driver problem...duh!
What i suspect is happening is that as windows is loading it checks the firmware for specifications limitations if they are exceeded it quits, end of story.
this information is usually stored in the ACPI tables in the firmware.
To get my Dell Laptop to think it was a MacBook, I built a custom DSDT table that Chameleon injects before the OSX boot so it just doesn't know any better than to run. To my knowledge, people just haven't had to do this on Windows machines but I suspect that this problem will surface as more users try to upgrade their laptop as the memory technology has provided. It dawned on me that there might be a BCD option that disables the firmware check. Seems like a reasonable option to put in so I started looking for it.
Not a lot of information out there on this issue, but i found some options that might be relevant. Maxmem=num, or /PCILOCK or DISABLE_INTEGRITY_CHECKS
My question is can I use EasyBCD to set them? From what I can tell the options look hardwired. Also is their a way to edit and inject a DSDT table for Windows?
I think it is a crime that Microsoft is limiting their operating system to only use a certain configuration of memory. Any ideas out there?
i am multi-booting into Win7, Win8, and Mountain lion 10.8.2 all works fine. i saw that memory had gotten dirt cheap and figured that it was worth the investment. so i bought two 8g sticks to replace my two 2g sticks. popped the new memory in and the bios promptly recognized the 16g of new memory no problem. Switched over to my OSX boot and up she comes with 16g of main memory. Runs great!
Feeling good i go over to booting up Win7, loading bar completes, get the splash screen a pause and a soft reset to the system!
i switch over to the Win8 partition and same result.
i am of course using 64bit versions of both operating systems so it is clear that isn't the problem. so i pull out the install disk and boot off of them thinking maybe a driver or something. It does the same thing! thinking maybe a newer version might be more robust i download Windows Server 2012 and try that install disk. Indeed it is a different loader program because after the four sheets logo it gives a blue screen of death with an error before shutting off the machine.
Tried all of the combinations of memory sticks including singles and mixing with 2g stick, etc. no go.
Come to find out my A11 version of Dell Bios (their latest and i suspect last upgrade) will only support two 4g memory sticks, not even just one 8g. stick
Obviously the machine supports the 16g as i can boot linux disks all day long as well, it is Microsoft and Dell working together to make sure folks have to buy new machines. In talking to Crucial they claim and rightfully so that their memory is just fine, and that it is a windows driver problem...duh!
What i suspect is happening is that as windows is loading it checks the firmware for specifications limitations if they are exceeded it quits, end of story.
this information is usually stored in the ACPI tables in the firmware.
To get my Dell Laptop to think it was a MacBook, I built a custom DSDT table that Chameleon injects before the OSX boot so it just doesn't know any better than to run. To my knowledge, people just haven't had to do this on Windows machines but I suspect that this problem will surface as more users try to upgrade their laptop as the memory technology has provided. It dawned on me that there might be a BCD option that disables the firmware check. Seems like a reasonable option to put in so I started looking for it.
Not a lot of information out there on this issue, but i found some options that might be relevant. Maxmem=num, or /PCILOCK or DISABLE_INTEGRITY_CHECKS
My question is can I use EasyBCD to set them? From what I can tell the options look hardwired. Also is their a way to edit and inject a DSDT table for Windows?
I think it is a crime that Microsoft is limiting their operating system to only use a certain configuration of memory. Any ideas out there?