Lol .. funniest "tech answer" ever. You get 100 points for quoting this nonsense. If you force your chip carrier incorrectly into a chip socket, you get grinding noises and game over. If you bend a few pins of the carrier while fumbling, you get a stinking smell when switching on the pc and game over....

It could also be Windows limiting the amount of RAM.

Click the "Start button" and in the search box type "msconfig"
Press enter.
Then click on the "Boot" tab, then click on the "Advanced options" button, and un-select "Maximum memory".
Or select it and put in "4096" for 4gb of ram.

Hit "OK" and done, just reboot the machine.

If it's not that, then it would most certainly be a hardware issue, be it a stick is faulty, not seated properly, may need a little more voltage to your memory controller or RAM.

Well, the PC is louder because the CPU is probably running hotter than it used to. Typically, 70 C is the recommended max so you are still ok as far as temperature goes, but I like to keep my PC around 20 C. As for the memory, it seems like a continuity issue to me. I am assuming the motherboard supports dual channel memory. I would suggest getting memtest86 and burn it to a disc to check your RAM http://www.memtest86.com/. Also, if you have any other open dual-channels, I would try moving the DIMMs to those slots to rule out whether it's the slots or the actual DIMMs themselves.

Please don't question my answers when you've clearly got no idea what you're on about.  Its a known issue with the i7 CPU that the socket is flaky and in particular simply clamping the board too tightly with some heatsinks cause board flex that produces this issue.  Try doing some research before you wade in making an ass of yourself.  Bending CPU pins doesn't cause a burning smell on power on as you normally get no actually power on in most cases due to the post process not detecting the CPU.  in this instance the issue can be a poor connection with the portions of the chip that run the memory controller.  Also you don't get any "grinding" noise so that's garbage too.

Now kindly go away before I have to make you look really stupid.

I have 2gbs of reserved memory, but why?

I have tried this, and yet windows still reserves 2gb of RAM for some reason.

I am not entirely sure about your situation, but a long time ago my computer wasn't using all of the RAM it had available as well. The reason why, at the time, was because my power supply was too weak to support everything, so it cut back on the RAM.

i have or off the same situation but i know the reason and the solution.

my laptop has 32gb of ram installed but only has 16gb used when i go to system in control panel it saids i have 32gbs installed but only 16gb are usable and its because my laptop came whit windows 7 64bits home premium and i need to upgrade to profetional or ultimate to be able to use my 32gbs.

If i go to resource monitor it only shows hardware reserved 16gbs also, now the thing whit you is that you say that before it used to show you had 4gbs, maybe you changed ur operating system to windows 7 starter or student versions??? cheek under control panel on system and seeif it reads like mine installed 4gb usable 2gb...

hope this helps

Maybe this support link might help:

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/978610/en-us

So right. When i took a course for IT support, they said google is the best tool.