Do you really have 16 gig? If so what are you running that's taking up over 10 gb? Regardless your computer isn't designed for more than 16 however that might change with a future bios update. For the record I don't recommend a bios update.

yes i have 16gig i use auto cad and i do alot of video editing,however my hard drive crashed and i put in a 1.5 tb and attempted to use the resteore disks from my hp to load the operating system but iam getting a error message saying the drive is part of a paton i didnt think the oem restore disks were tied to the hard drive as well only the motherboard correct?

hp machines blow the motherboard and the hard drive are both tatooed you cant change the power supply as the motherboard recieves its dmi number from it and if the powersupply does not supply the correct dmi number its a no go so basicaly if anything takes a crap on a hp your out of luck unless you spend ungodly amounts to buy the parts from hp sorry had to vent a bit

Well that stinks. I knew that the disk is tied to the computer (that's common) but I didn't know that about the hard drive. How did you confirm that?

hp customer service after about 3 hours of b*tching i finaly got hp to replace my motherboard cpu hard drive optical drive and psu plus there sending me a box and a prepaid label to send this paperweight to them so hopefuly that will solve my issue since all that is left is the memory (yes some how the optical drive is tied in for reading recovery disks only if the recovery disk doesnt read the imbedded code from the optical drive the recovery dicks will not work otherwise you can change the drive all you want it only has to be the stock one to read recovery disks that was told to me by the manager of the service department scheduling my repair

now you said that 16 gigs is a bad idea so if i remove the 16 gigs and were to step down to say 6 gigs the problem i see is that since it is dual channel memory and i would be using a odd number of dimm slots for 6 gigs(3 dimms) it would revert the memory back to single channel would i be better off only using 2 of the 3 sticks and have 4 gigs so it remains dual channel? or should i go out and buy a 8 gig kit 4x2
thanks for the help