i got windows vista home premium 32 bit. iv tested the ram in different slots and it all seems to work fine, but when i put the 2 sticks together only half of them works.

Run a program like cpu-z to see if it picks it up... if it doesnt, it could be that that your setup doesnt support 4Gbs of RAM... Check it out in ur user manuals...

If u can could u provide us the type of ram which u have DDR1 or DDR2?

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32 bit Windows can't see all of your available memory. Generally it is a waste to have more than 3gigs of memory on 32bit. If you want, you could upgrade to 64bit windows.

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32 bit windows can see up to 4gig of ram. Any more is wasted.
My question, did you go into your BIOS, and make sure it shows the correct amount of ram??
Next, Windows does at times mis-represent how much ram is installed and usable (using the Properties of My Computer).
Did you check out the Performance tab of the Task manager??

Barring software problems, it is very likely that you may have some bad RAM on one of the sticks.

What type of computer?
What type of ram (brand and model info would be nice)?
What motherboard (if a home grown PC)

There are some softwares (I believe Ash pointed out some) that you can use to do some intensive tests on the RAM while it's in use, as well as show you what it sees (total ram installed). Give those a try and see if it's just a windows glitch.

i got the ocz sli ready ram, ddr2 each stick is 2 gigs but when there together it only show i got 2.75 gigs

Actually 32 Bit Windows OS can read up to 4 GB of RAM, but what you need to do is to check your BIOS to see what the limitations are.

also what type of MoBo(Mother Boards)do you have??
if you could post a picture of your BIOS readings we might be able to help more. Besides, keep in mind that upgrading your OS to 64Bit is ONLY essential to run programs requires more than 2GB of RAM.

Finally, heres some information from Ian Griifth "To address 4GB of memory you need 32 bits of address bus. (Assuming individual bytes are addressable.) This gives us a problem - the same problem that IBM faced when designing the original PC. You tend to want to have more than just memory in a computer - you need things like graphics cards and hard disks to be accessible to the computer in order for it to be able to use them. So just as the original PC had to carve up the 8086's 1MB addressing range into memory (640K) and 'other' (384K), the same problem exists today if you want to fit memory and devices into a 32-bit address range: not all of the available 4GB of address space can be given over to memory.

For a long time this wasn't a problem, because there was a whole 4GB of address space, so devices typically lurk up in the top 1GB of physical address space, leaving the bottom 3GB for memory. And 3GB should be enough for anyone, right? "

Good luck, let us know!