512mb appears to be 256mb

[sensei]

I have a G4 Dual 1ghz processor PowerMac (quicksilver) and just bought a new 512mb 184 pin stick of PC133 SDRAM. Documentation says my three slots will accept up to 512MB each but when I installed this memory in the second available slot, System Profile shows it as a 256MB stick. Same result in the 3rd slot. I already have one 512MB stick in the primary slot that shows the correct ammount.

I've seen bad memory before but never seen it show up at half what the manufacturer says it is. Any ideas?

[andychrist]

I had the exact same thing happen on my old iMac G3-- a stick labeled 512 MB registering only 256 MB. Distributor exchanged it for a Samsung stick that worked.

Different brands of RAM with the same specs will not all be equally compatible in your Mac, so it is perhaps best to purchase memory from a distributor that matches specific makes to your model. One such vendor is OWC.

Btw, welcome to the forums.

[Decado]

my girlfriend had this problem.
Reason: you probably have a memory that is divided with 256 mb on each side.
solution: change it to a memory that has all 512 mb on the same side.

rant: her computer could only read memory from one side of the stick. it took forever before we figured it out.

rant #2: maybe i'm remembering wrong. it could have been that the memory she bought had all 512 on the same side, but that the computer could only read 256 from each side... hmm. it was fixed anyway when we changed to the other alternative whatever that was.