W701 Certain nagging performance issues w/ win7 reinstall

[arretium]

First the computer

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41C9170 3YR Depot

So I purchased an additional SSD, an Intel 160 GB. I also purchased 8 gigs of pc1333 ram. I installed the ram first and had a total of 10 GB. Blazing fast. All is well.


Well, shortly after I installed the SSD drive (which was after I installed the ram), and I reinstalled win7 64bit (which I had to in order to get the system to boot off the ssd drive),
I began the slow and tedious process of reinstalling the drivers. This appears to be an unfinished state. Here's the problems:

#1 - Windows Experience Rating is .1 lower than what it was before for both CPU and RAM. I don't understand that, anyone know why?
#1 (b) - Am I missing a very important motherboard driver? How on earth could the CPU and RAM now score 7.0 on the WER when it was scoring a 7.1. Maybe I'm being nitpicky here but this is annoying. I've basically shelled out $4K for this beast and I want top working order!! Any ideas?

#2 - The bios reports my total ram as 6 GB. I want my other 4 gigs back. Don't know if it did this before I installed the SSD drive, so I don't know if there is a connection there. After I type this post and print off the how to on removing the ram underneath the keyboard, I'm going to pull the SSD drive and see what happens. But does anyone have a clue?

[Harryc]

You didn't change your CPU, so a close rating is what I'd expect. The WER for RAM measures RAM speed not quantity. If you need that much RAM for what you do then that's all you should be concerned with.

[AMATX]

When installing the SSD, is this a replacement for the original drive? If so, try cloning it(via Acronis, for example). No additional drivers needed, etc., and should be a bit image copy of what you used for your baseline performance numbers.

As far as memory, did you verify the total number of Gig when you had windows up? Just to make sure Win7 is reporting the same value as the bios. And, since you have 10Gig total(likely 2g + 4G +4g) memory modules, I'd guess maybe one of the 4G memory sticks came loose or crapped out. Slight possibility one of the memory slots is not working. Standard tactic here is to reseat each memory stick and evaluate. If still incorrect, start swapping sticks between the various memory slots, to nail down exactly where the problem is. You should have four slots, and with three sticks, so there's a variety of configs you can try.