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I'm a novice computer building and I'm trying to update my old Dell Dimension 4600 (circa 2003). The original system had the following:

2.66 GHz Pent 4
512 MB RAM
40GB HDD

I had added the following during the course of its life span:

eGeForce 6600 AGP, 256 MB
300GB Hard Disk

To help improve its sluggish speed, I recently upgraded the ram from 512MB (2 sticks of 256MB DDR, PC2700) to 2GBS (2 sticks of 1GB DDR, PC2700). After installing the RAM, I've been encountering numerous problems. These problems include the BSOD, numerous crashing, tons of Win32 errors, and just about all programs closing to due to fatal errors.

I've run memtest on both sticks of RAM together as well as each stick independently for about 2 hours each. All the scans revealed indicated the memory was fine.

I attempted to reinstall windows xp, but it locked up about 3/4 of the way through (after it got to "installing devices"). I eventually replaced the old original RAM and was able to finish the windows install, but I'm hesitant to add the new RAM back.

Does anyone have any insights ito what may be causing all these problems? One idea I got from perusing these boards is a lack of power? The power supply in the tower has an output of 250W. Would this new RAM (4x the original) be too much for the supply?

Thank you so much for your help!

Welcome to the forum, can you post your motherboard make and model number - you can use THIS TOOL if you are unsure.

I think I have an Intel 865G motherboard.

I am having EXACTLY the same problem and I had 764MB of ram and tried to add a 1GB stick instead of the 256MB stick and now I got 1.5 GB ram and exactly the same problem...MANY MANY BSOD, windows crashes, application crashes, nonesense errors and more...and system has become overall SLOWER!!! and I recommend you use balarc advisor to get whatever info bout your system.
my mother board is: GA-8S650GXM

The problem seems to me, is that you're trying to upgrade a computer that isn't designed to have that much memory.

I strongly suggest if you haven't already done it, is to update your BIOS, as this will increase support for larger memory.

Either that, or the memory is faulty. I suggest running some mem tests.

Well I have tried updating the bios but it gives errors...

What kind of errors? The only time you should get errors is if you've selected the wrong BIOS update. You'll get warninig msgs if you've got the same version already installed or are trying to downgrade your BIOS.