[SpaceyWilly]

I'm having a really odd problem, and I think it's motherboard related. Yesterday, I decided to swap a core 2 duo into my HTPC machine to try to get the virtual windows XP thing working. It kept coming up with "New CPU detected... press f1 to enter bios or f2 to load default settings and continue." I went into the BIOS and made sure the settings were correct and did a save and exit, then it came up with the message again. I thought it might be that the BIOS wasn't compatible with the core 2 duo I was using, so I updated it but that didn't help. Now I put the core 2 quad that was working fine before back in and it still is giving me the error every time.

Now this really isn't a big deal since I hardly ever reboot my HTPC machine, but there's another problem. I have 4GB of memory installed, and it shows up fine as 4GB in the BIOS, but when I boot into Windows it is only showing 767MB. In the Windows 7 resource monitor, the other 3.3GB are shown as "Hardware Reserved - Memory that is reserved by the BIOS and some drivers for other peripherals." Now the computer is running really slowly and paging to the hard drive constantly. I never had this problem before I tried to do the CPU swap. What's happening here?

Here's what I'm running
Asus P5N7A-VM
Core 2 Quad Q8200 or Core 2 Duo E6600
Crucial 2x2GB RAM

BTW, the clock and BIOS settings are being stored fine so it doesn't seem to be a CMOS battery issue.

[w2richwood]

sounds like you may need to update your bios to a later bios
Rich

[jmdixon85]

Since you said you have updated your BIOS (latest version being 0512) you should not have a problem with either CPU. I would check all BIOS settings carefully and if everything seems to be ok I would then inspect the Mobo carefully. Since you changed the CPU I would remove it and check for any bent pins, I would also re-seat your RAM and try that.