Can updating my motherboard's drivers decrease my RAM efficiency?

[Kewidogg]

Ok, recently I bought a 1.33ghz athlon and K7VZA motherboard. Put it all together blah blah and booted up. Noticed as it loaded up it only said 1.0 ghz processor, and me being the computer wiz (I'm not actually I'm kinda stupid with computers compared to most on this board I would assume) upgraded my motherboard drivers. Well after upgrading, which wasnt all that bad because the newer ones supposedly were more stable, etc, I figured out why it was only going 1 ghz. My FSB was set wrong. Fixed that, and it loads up and is going 1.33ghz now. However, my RAM is totally weak now. I use MemTurbo, a program that actively shows how much physical ram you have available and such. Normally when I am doing absolutely nothing and have nothing open, it says ~200 megs (of 256) RAM is free. However, now it says ~150 is free. I decided to test and see if it was the FSB change that affected it, but no it wasn't, and the only other change I made was updating my mobo drivers. Anyone else experience this or know a solution (and if the solution is to uninstall my mobo drivers, explain how? I don't think Add/Remove software would be effective for uninstalling my mobo ;-)

[Bovon]

Kinda sounds to me like you have a wad of stuff running in the background. Bring up your end task screen, and close everything except explorer and systray. (Ahhhwell, you can leave MemTurbo running I guess)

To answer your inital question...personally I have never heard of drivers/applications (except big memory hogs) affecting ram performance...remember, the more stuff you have loaded, either open apps or those running in the back ground slow a machine down.

[Kewidogg]

I close everything, and generally have 200 megs free, except now I only get around 150ish, if that much.

[Peter M]

Have a look at whether the board's BIOS accepted all the RAM as good at 133 MHz. You wouldn't be the first to have a defective DIMM that sort of works at 100 and doesn't at 133.

BIOS cuts the reported memory size off at the first RAM cell error it detects.

regards, Peter