RAM problems

Hello,

I recently purchased 2 Kingston 256MB PC133 SDRAM for a friend of mine. His mobo specs indicated it would support 256MB PC133, but Dell wanted to sell him the chips for $80 bucks a piece, so I bought it online for $35 each. I tried to install the RAM for him, but his PC would not recognize it, and he would get a blue screen of death saying memory was too low. When I tried putting in just one 256MB with or without his original 64MB, his PC would not boot. I even called the Dell hotline, and they could not tell me why the chips would not work, even though they confirmed the RAM specs seemed fine.

I then put the RAM in my home PC with the 256MB chip I already have. My PC booted up fine, indicating that I have a total of 768MB RAM, but when I tried to play a game, I got an error that it could not "create 3D device" and "Error E_OUTOFMEMORY" (which memory - video or system?). I ran dxdiag, and when I tried to test Direct 3D, I got errors. Now, I realize that my video card has its own memory, so I don't know why my problems would have anything to do with system RAM, but if I just leave in my old RAM, everything works fine. Would anyone have any clue as to why I am having these kind of problems?

Dave Jordan