AWKWARD ZOMBIE

Check what the sticks themselves say. They might have packaged 4GB sticks accidentally.

we tried both sticks in all combinations on the mobo and got the same results. just looked at the sticks and they both say 8gb. about to boot the computer up and i'll run the bios and see what it tells me with a proper windows install.

You could try plugging the sticks in another mobo you know works fine to see if the problem is with the sticks or not. If it is, I'd just RMA them.

i didn't test the sticks on a different mobo, but i did put sticks that i knew showed the right amount of ram from another computer in and they did show the correct amount. i still have the borked ones in right now because 8gb is fine for now, but yeah i'm probably just gonna toss em or something (i didn't buy them, they were given to me quite a while ago,) and buy new ones. not that big of a deal tbh. still would like to know what's going on though. they show up wrong even on my fresh windows install.

If you contact the manufacturer they might offer to replace them for free since they're defective. 16gigs of RAM is around 120-150bucks these days so it's worth a shot.

another weird thing that's happened since building this new computer - one of my monitors is now noticeable darker than the other. no settings were changed, and they're the exact same monitor, and were fine before. only difference is one is in dvi and one is in hdmi - the hdmi one is lighter. i think it's the ~true~ colour one which is good because it's the one i edit photos and stuff on, but the internet is on the other one and my photos look like shit if i upload them :<

What does the monitor says it the maximum amount of RAM it can use? It could have a limit that prevents it from seeing more than 4 gigs per stick, though ordinarily that sort of limit only applies to the total sum.

What's the motherboard's model number?

alright mystery solved. the answer is my brother in law is a dick and didn't tell me he put two 4 gig sticks in a box marked two 8 gig sticks. booty.

Hey Windows folks
Last week my Windows partition crapped itself so I had to reinstall everything (using the same disk I've been using for two years on the same laptop, which worked perfectly in the past), and for some reason it didn't install any driver (no usb, no networking, but my trackpad was working). I reinstalled it again but it didn't fix anything. I managed to get a driver for wired Internet (Windows is telling me there's no hardware for wireless even though everything is working just as well as it has always done under Linux). I managed to install additional drivers and 154 updates and then spend 2h30 installing those updates yesterday (plus 45 minutes today), but still no wi-fi and my mouse wasn't working.
I'm currently in the process of getting another Windows DVD to see if it could fix my problems, but do you know what would cause a Windows installation disk to stop including basic drivers?

My only advice would be to check the manufacturer's page for that particular model instead of relying on Windows.

Yeah that's how I got the first driver.
I'll try that it the new DVD doesn't work either.

Check your laptop's manufacturer website as well as those for individual parts if you weren't doing that already. Maybe check the BIOS to see if something went screwy there, but I have no idea what could have caused this.

The only thing I remember changing myself was the order of the boot sequence, and I went back and reverted it when I first noticed something was wrong. I can take another look though. Thanks.

Okay, so apparently the only working phone jack is all the way across the house from my apartment, and my wimpy little baby router that I got from the service provider can't handle the distance (And is starting to drop signal pretty frequently anyway). Any suggestions that aren't super expensive?