Sorry i'm not Dave but i thought i'd take a whack at explaining it..
Thanks a lot for your elaborate explanation, Pam, highly appreciated ! :salute:
Truth is i'm far from a computer expert... compared to my car, i think i'm a good driver, i can change a sparkplug or a wheel, or even oil if need be but that's about it...
With my earlier puters, which often just stopped working, i learned a little bit about the Cmos menu but since i bought my first Dell computer i can't even remember having seen one...
After reading your explanation it's therefore been the first time since years that i hit the F2 key during initial start-up... Been carefully looking around ( still scares the hell out of me...

) but i simply can't find anything related to ram, let alone changing the memory mode from asynch to synch....
Can you please steer me in the right direction here, Pam ?....
Btw, it's 12GB 1600MHz (3x4GB) Tri Channel Memory sitting there in the dungeons of my Alienware Area51ALX monster. Processor is : Intel Core i7-980x(3.33GHz,6.4GT/s 12MB ). Graphics : Single 1.5GB NVIDIA GeForce GTX 480. Two 600GB Serial ATA HD's plus one 300GB Serial ATA HD, all at 10000 rpm, the latter just for FSX. This all coming to live on a 30" Dell 3008WFP monitor. OS : Dutch Genuine Windows 7 Professional (64 BIT)
Would love to try anything to get rid of the bsod's ( initially each FSX testflight ended with one.... ) although after a lot of tweaking and using nHancer it seems a lot better now. Bsod logs always name 'XTUservice' as the source ( Intel Extreme Tuning Utility ) and error : XMP Initialization Failed. Blue screen mostly says : SYSTEM_SERVICE_EXCEPTION MEMORY MANAGEMENT
Thanks again, Pam !
Cheers,
Jan