I am currently running vista, I have 1gb of ram already (894 is only being read) the 2 512mb sticks of ram I have are pc2 4200 533mghz.

The one I bought is 1gb pc2 4200, I have a dell c521, with an amd athlon 64bit x2 duo core processor. So I know I bought the right kind of ram. So is it a faulty one? Or my motherboard, which is an nforce not support it?

The kind of ram I bought was kingston, since that's all circuit city had.

try using only the 1gig stick for now, put it in the first ram slot.

That doesn't work either.

i was at staples yesterday, and i was looking at a laptop, it said it had 1.96GB, which is a similar issue to this

could it possibly be graphics aperature[sp?]?

Onboard Video that uses the other part of the RAM .

wait, im under the asumption that you have 2gigs of ram, correct?

jca2007, Just return the stick and ask if they can check it, also try to change it for 2x 512MB...